Separating Contract Manufacturing Fact From Fiction
Posted on Fri, Feb 03, 2012 @ 12:28 PM
The New York Times recently accused Apple of knowing that Foxconn, the largest manufacturer of electronics in China, was abusing workers and did nothing about it. You can read the report here.
According to the Times, report surfaced after an anonymous Apple executive told the Times, "We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on. Why? Because the system works for us.”
As you can imagine - the story has caused an uproar at Apple forcing CEO Tim Cook to issue several statements defending Apple’s manufacturing process. In an email to employees, Cook noted:
- “We are focused on educating workers about their rights, so they are empowered to speak up when they see unsafe conditions or unfair treatment. As you know, more than a million people have been trained by our program."
- “Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain. As we reported earlier this month, we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people."
What caught our eye here at DirecSource was the mere fact that the CEO of a major company like Apple was even put into a position of having to defend the company’s manufacturing practices.
At DirecSource, we put all the factories we work with through a rigorous audit process and we continuously monitor factory conditions to ensure that the CEO’s of the company’s we work with are not put in the position that Tim Cook has been put in.
Should an accusation be made accusing one of the factories about working conditions – we partner with you to provide you with all the necessary documents from our audit process - as well as testimony about what we saw during our many visits to the factory. As Tim Cook learned, anyone can make accusations – what’s important is that there is a system in place that quickly helps to separate fact from fiction.
To read more about our risk management policy click here.