'put yourself in the other's shoes' .. the letter re the aunt is a good one a reminder to those who seem to have forgotten the ancient adage .. of course, some who 'seem' to have have forgotten it are only out to demonize ..
Apple, Foxconn vow wide revamp of worker conditions
By Poornima Gupta and Edwin Chan SAN FRANCISCO | Thu Mar 29, 2012 4:10pm EDT
(Reuters) - In a landmark development for the way Western companies do business in China, Apple Inc said Thursday it had agreed to work with partner Foxconn to substantially improve wages and working conditions at the factories that produce its wildly popular products.
Foxconn - which makes Apple devices from the iPhone to the iPad - will hire tens of thousands of new workers, clamp down on illegal overtime, improve safety protocols and upgrade worker housing and other amenities.
The moves came in response to one of the largest investigations ever conducted of a U.S. company's operations abroad. Apple had agreed to the probe by the independent Fair Labor Association in response to a crescendo of criticism that its products were built on the backs of mistreated Chinese workers.
The Association, in disclosing its findings from a survey of three Foxconn plants and over 35,000 workers, said it had unearthed multiple violations of labor law, including extreme hours and unpaid overtime.
Apple, the world's most valuable corporation, and Foxconn, China's biggest private-sector employer and Apple' main contract manufacturer, are so dominant in the global technology industry that their newly forged accord will likely have a substantial ripple effect across the sector.
Working conditions at many Chinese manufacturers that supply Western companies are considerably inferior to those at Foxconn.
"Apple and Foxconn are obviously the two biggest players in this sector and since they're teaming up to drive this change, I really do think they set the bar for the rest of the sector," FLA President Auret van Heerden told Reuters in an interview.
More immediately, the Apple-Foxconn agreement will raise costs for other manufacturers who contract with the Taiwanese company, including Dell Inc, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon.com Inc, Motorola Mobility Holdings, Nokia Oyj and Sony Corp.
The agreement will likely result in higher prices for consumers, though the impact will be limited because labor costs are only a small fraction of the total cost for most high-tech devices.
Foxconn said it would reduce working hours to 49 hours per week, including overtime, while keeping total compensation for workers at its current level. The FLA audit had found that during peak production times, workers in the three factories put in more than 60 hours per week on average.
To compensate for the reduced hours, Foxconn will hire tens of thousands of additional workers. It also said it would build more housing and canteens to accommodate that influx.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, who company critics hoped would usher in a more open, transparent era at Apple after he took over from the late Steve Jobs last fall, has shown a willingness to tackle the global criticism head-on.
The much-anticipated report marks the first phase of a probe into Apple's contract manufacturers across the world's most populous nation. With 1.2 million workers, Foxconn - an affiliate of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry - is by far Apple's largest and most influential partner.
Workers cleaned up glass from the broken windows of a security room at an entrance of the Foxconn Technology plant in Taiyuan on Monday.
By DAVID BARBOZA and KEITH BRADSHER September 24, 2012
SHANGHAI — Foxconn Technology, a major supplier to some of the world’s electronics giants, including Apple, said it had closed one of its large Chinese plants Monday after the police were called in to break up a fight among factory employees.
The company late Monday said the incident was confined to an employee dormitory and “no production facilities or equipment have been affected.”
A spokesman said some people had been hurt and detained by the police after the disturbance escalated into a riot late Sunday. The company said the cause of the disturbance was still under investigation.
One Foxconn employee reached by telephone Monday afternoon, however, said the disturbance had begun when workers started brawling with security guards, and it eventually had led to a huge riot involving more than 1,000 workers. Foxconn said no property had been destroyed or damaged.
Unconfirmed photographs and video circulated on social networking sites, purporting to be from the factory, showed smashed windows, riot police officers and large groups of workers milling around. The Foxconn plant, in the Chinese city of Taiyuan, employs about 79,000 workers.
The Chinese state-run news media said 5,000 police officers had been called in to quell the riot.
A Foxconn spokesman declined to specify whether the Taiyuan plant made products for the Apple iPhone 5, which went on sale last week, but he said it supplied goods to many consumer electronics brands.
An employee at the Taiyuan plant, however, said iPhone components were made there. Most Apple-related production, though, takes place in other parts of China, particularly in the provinces of Sichuan and Henan. Apple could not be reached for comment.
Foxconn said it employs about 1.1 million workers in China.
Labor unrest in Taiyuan, in northern China’s Shanxi province, comes as strikes and other worker protests appear to be increasing in frequency in China this year compared to last year, said Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit advocacy group in Hong Kong seeking collective bargaining and other protections for workers in mainland China.
Many of the protests this year appear to be related to the country’s economic slowdown, as employees demand the payment of overdue wages from financially struggling companies, or insist on compensation when money-losing factories in coastal provinces are closed and moved to lower-cost cities in the interior.
But the level of labor unrest in China this year has not yet matched 2010, when a surge in inflation sparked a wave of worker demands for higher pay, Mr. Crothall said.
Mr. Crothall said that while the cause of the latest dispute in Taiyuan remained unclear, his group had found an online video of police there using a megaphone to address “workers from Henan” – the adjacent province to the south of Shanxi. The police officer said that the workers’ concerns would be addressed.
Disputes involving large groups of migrant workers are common in China. In some cases, workers protest after believing that they have been promised a certain pay package and traveled a long distance to claim it, only to find on arrival that the details are different from what they expected. In other cases, workers from different provinces with different cultural traditions coming together in a single factory have clashed over social issues or perceived slights.
The disturbance is the latest problem to hit Foxconn, a key supplier of products to Apple and other global electronics companies, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.
Foxconn, which is part of Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, has been struggling to improve labor conditions at its China factories after reports about labor abuse and work safety violations.
Apple and Foxconn have worked together in the last year to improve conditions, raise pay and improve labor standards.
Mr. Crothall, the spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, said workers in China had become increasingly emboldened.
“They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice,” he said, adding that damage to factory buildings and equipment still appeared to be unusual, occurring in fewer than 1 in 20 protests.
The same Taiyuan factory was the site of a brief strike during a pay dispute last March, the Hong Kong news media reported then.
Social media postings suggested that some injuries might have occurred when people were trampled in crowds of protesters.
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