I own an iPad 2 and I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.
However, in doing the research on my own word invention…“iPadology,”…or the study of the iPad, I found some disconcerting information on how and where the stellar iPad is made.
Do you think that the iPad is made in the USA? Yes and no. The technology comes from California at Apple headquarters. However, the assembly of most iPads is done in China, as is that of iPhones and iPods.
In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world.
However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.
Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77.
Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chinese Chengdu plant.
“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”
“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.
“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.
According to a New York Times report, Apple has said it requires every discovered labor violation to be remedied, and suppliers that refuse are terminated. Privately, however, some former executives concede that finding new suppliers is time-consuming and costly. Foxconn is one of the few manufacturers in the world with the scale to build sufficient numbers of iPhones and iPads. So Apple is “not going to leave Foxconn and they’re not going to leave China,” said Heather White, a research fellow at Harvard and a former member of the Monitoring International Labor Standards committee at the National Academy of Sciences. “There’s a lot of rationalization.”
In a prior blog, I virtually canonized Steve Jobs. However, as the CEO of Apple he had to know that worker conditions in China were abysmal.
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
When asked how the more than 700,000 Apple jobs overseas could come back to the US, Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said. The questioner was the President.
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option.
A former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation, and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
The Apple outsourcing story is the reason jobs are lost in the US. When I taught Global Issues a decade ago, I could see what globalization was already doing. Wages in the US, with decades of influence by unions, were way out of balance with wages in countries like China, Mexico, and India.
The other day I listened to Donald Trump claim that the US is rebuilding China. He’s right. That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.
The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day.
How can US companies afford to manufacture anything in the US?
I love my iPad. How it got into my hands stinks.
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