AppleInsider reports on an interview with a representative of Hong Kong-based nonprofit Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) claiming that Foxconn used advance knowledge of recent audits by the Fair Labor Association to hide underage workers from auditors. Specifically, the report addresses the issue of 16- and 17-year olds, who are permitted to work under Apple's supplier code of conduct if allowed under local laws, but with special restrictions on types and duration of their work.
[SACOM project officer Debby Sze Wan] Chan said she had heard from two Foxconn workers in Zhenghou last week that the manufacturer was "prepared for the inspection" by the Fair Labor Association that had been commissioned by Apple and began last week.
"All underage workers, between 16-17 years old, were not assigned any overtime work and some of them were even sent to other departments," Chan reported the workers as having said.
Other workers reported to the agency that Foxconn had relaxed certain policies such as by adding additional break periods ahead of the audits.
Fair Labor Association president Auret van Heerden noted to Nightline's Bill Weir in a segment that aired yesterday that his group always expects to receive "a show" when it arrives for its audits, but that its interview techniques and other strategies help to dig beneath the surface to find more accurate representations of working conditions.
Chan's organization also focuses on issues of student labor, alleging that local Chinese governments have in some cases forced school to sent their students to Foxconn for internships even when the work is completely outside of their field of study.
Apple's high-profile presence and Foxconn's role as its largest manufacturing partner have cast the two firms into the spotlight over the issue of worker rights and factory conditions. The issues are of course not unique to the two companies, although Apple's public statements and attempts transparency have also contributed to the focused attention.
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Saturday April 27, 2024 12:41 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
There are widespread reports of Apple users being locked out of their Apple ID overnight for no apparent reason, requiring a password reset before they can log in again. Users say the sudden inexplicable Apple ID sign-out is occurring across multiple devices. When they attempt to sign in again they are locked out of their account and asked to reset their password in order to regain access. ...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...
Top Rated Comments
When I was 16-17 I often worked in Apple orchards 14 hrs. a day.
Here in Amerika.
Still, if true, I'm not surprised. You shouldn't be either.