Apple ethical issues

Ethical Issues at Apple page 132.

The closing case describes the deplorable working conditions at the Apple factory in China page 132 (look below). Wages are very low and working conditions are poor.What do you think apple should do to ethically to correct this Problem?

Ethical Issues at Apple

In mid-2006, news reports surfaced suggesting there were systematic labor abuses at a factory in China that makes the iPhone and iPod for Apple, Inc. According to the reports, workers at Hongfujin Precision Industry were paid as little as $50 a month to work 15-hour shifts making Apple products. There were also reports of forced overtime and poor living conditions for the workers, many of them young women who had migrated from the countryside to work at the plant and lived in company-owned dormitories.

The 2006 articles were the work of two Chinese journalists, Wang You and Weng Bao, employed by China Business News, a state-run newspaper. The target of the reports, Hongfujin Precision Industry, was reportedly China’s largest export manufacturer with overseas sales totaling $14.5 billion. Hongfujin is owned by Foxconn, a large Taiwanese conglomerate, whose customers (in addition to Apple) include Intel, Dell, and Sony Corporation. The Hongfujin factory is a small city in its own right, with clinics, recreational facilities, buses, and 13 restaurants that serve the 200,000 employees.

Upon hearing the news, Apple management responded quickly, pledging to audit the operations to make sure Hongfujin was complying with Apple’s code on labor standards for subcontractors. Managers at Hongfujin took a somewhat different tack; they filed a defamation suit against the two journalists, suing them for $3.8 million in a local court, which promptly froze the journalists’ personal assets pending a trial. Clearly, the management of Hongfujin was trying to send a message to the journalist community—criticism would be costly. The suit sent a chill through the Chinese journalist community because Chinese courts have shown a tendency to favor powerful, locally based companies in legal proceedings.