Fair Labor Association Begins Auditing Foxconn's Manufacturing Facilities at Apple's Request
Last month, Apple and the Fair Labor Association (FLA) announced an agreement that would see the FLA monitoring workplace conditions in Apple's supply chain, providing independent oversight to ensure compliance with worker rights standards set by Apple and the FLA. Apple is the first technology company to join the FLA, a move which comes as Apple has been the subject of increasing criticism over Foxconn's treatment of its employees.
Apple today issued a press release announcing that the FLA has begun inspecting Foxconn's facilities at Apple's request, supplementing Apple's own auditing practices.
Apple today announced that the Fair Labor Association will conduct special voluntary audits of Apple’s final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, at Apple’s request. A team of labor rights experts led by FLA president Auret van Heerden began the first inspections Monday morning at the facility in Shenzhen known as Foxconn City.
“We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”
The release notes that the FLA will be conducting interviews of thousands of Foxconn employees as it assesses their working and living conditions. The FLA will have access to Foxconn's manufacturing areas, as well as the dormitories and other facilities where employees are housed in the massive complex.
Results of the Foxconn inspections will be posted on the FLA's site early next month, and similar inspections at Apple's other major manufacturing partners Quanta and Pegatron will follow this spring. Once inspections at the three companies' facilities are complete, the FLA will have assessed facilities where over 90% of Apple's products are assembled.
Popular Stories
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 ...
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 dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
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....
Top Rated Comments
Any rational and objective person would view this as a giant step forward.
Looks like iIrrational and iUnobjective are off to a fast start.
The media has been reporting about the deplorable conditions at Foxcon and pointing the finger at Apple.
Let's see if this gets the same coverage.
Yes, the wages are considerably higher in Japan, but so too is the cost of living. Nonetheless, factory jobs in Japan are incredibly difficult (and often dangerous), with marathon shifts (up to 16 hours a day), very few work breaks, military-like supervision, harsh disciplinary action for even the tiniest of employee errors, and a punishing physical and mental toll.
It makes me wonder whether the stories in the English-language media have been blown at least a bit out of proportion by Western reporters who simply don't understand the difference between what is tolerated by workers in the East versus those in the West.
Yes, yes they have. Just people like to bitch. Maybe this will finally shut them the hell up.
Apple gets called out and, as one Chinese rights leader said, we go after Apple because we get press; the others won't get us the press.
Apple the first tech company to join FLA, critics of all things say that doesn't mean anything.
Apple agrees to FLA monitoring working conditions, manufacturing facilities, residential facilities, both dorms and other...and now,,,the people who know more than the people on the ground, cast doubts before it even starts.
Hard to pay attention after a while.