As per a new report published by Fair Labor Association, Apple’s supplier in China, Quanta, has been found to violate overtime and pay rules apart from other violations.
The new report, which has highlighted many areas, where workers’ safety and pay are completely out of place. Incidentally, Apple was the first and only technology company to associate with FLA.
As per the report, Eighty percent of workers interviewed at the Shanghai facility and three percent of the workers interviewed at the Changshu facility reported being charged a hiring fee by a broker or labor dispatch agent. The FLA Code does not allow for such fees.
Also, as far as the factory is concerned, no monitoring mechanism, to check such kind of corruption in hiring process, has been been found in the factory.
As far as overtime violations are concerned, both facilities exceeded both the legal and FLA Code limits on hours of work during the busiest periods of the year. Similarly, both factories inconsistently provided workers with the 24 consecutive hours of rest per seven-day period required by the FLA Code.
Specifically mentioning the factory in Changshu, the report said that , in the fourth quarter of 2012, 62 percent of the total
workforce at least once did not receive this rest day, with the longest consecutive working period stretching to 16 days in a row.
In both factories, entry-level production workers earn at least the minimum wage, and are legally entitled to receive 80 percent of this wage for their sick leave. However, through management interviews and a review of payroll records and sick-leave policy, FLA assessors found that workers that had been with the factory for less than two years were paid only 60 percent of their wages for sick leave, rather than the 80 percent to which they were entitled.
As far as Apple’s statement is concerned, Apple said,
Apple conducted four follow-up inspections on top of the annual audits of both facilities, to ensure the needed corrections are in place.
Also, the report mentions that during and after the publication of this report, Apple had taken certain steps in order to look into these violations. This includes over 451 audits of the production facilities, in order to find problems and correct them immediately.
