In 2013, Apple found that one of its suppliers, Suyin Electronics, a company that made HDMI and USB ports for the company’s MacBook line, employed underage workers. The manufacturer promised to clean up his situation, but a subsequent investigation by Apple found three more underage workers, including a 14-year-old, on the Suyin assembly lines. Although Apple did not give Suyin a new job after its discoveries, it continued to work with the company due to some existing contracts, and it took nearly three years to finally sever ties.
In the other example, Apple conducted an investigation into Biel Crystal, a company that makes glass screens for the iPhone. After Apple discovered that “the environmental, health and safety culture in Biel is weak across all levels of management,” it asked for more than two dozen remedies. However, a year after the investigation, Biel had not yet implemented many of the improvements that Apple requested, and the two continued to work together in part because removing Biel from their supply chain would leave Apple in debt to a single screen supplier. of glass. This is something that the company tries to avoid at all costs because it can leverage two suppliers against each other to get the best price for the components. It also allows Apple to avoid situations like the one found when using Intel’s single-source modems.
In addition, in that specific case, penalizing Biel would mean switching orders to Lens Technology. This is the firm The Washington Post said this week uses Uighur forced labor to make parts for Apple, Amazon and other companies.
An Apple spokesman said The information the company has “the strictest industry standards to ensure that workers throughout our supply chain are treated with dignity and respect … We monitor the suppliers we work with and, if there are problems, we act quickly to ensure that they are treated and resolved or we ended the relationship, which we have done many times. ”We contacted Apple for additional comments and will update this article when we receive a response from the company.
Although Apple says it has cut ties with manufacturers many times in the past, its own reports suggest otherwise. Since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, the company has removed 22 installations from its supply chain. This is a small fraction of the more than 2,000 locations worldwide that help produce the company’s products.