Apple will investigate new claims of labor violations at Pegatron
U.S.-based watchdog group China Labor Watch (CLW) on Monday announced that its investigators had uncovered labor violations in three factories of Pegatron Group. Apple has steadily increased its manufacturing contracts with Pegatron, a Foxconn competitor. CLW’s report suggests that Apple has benefitted indirectly from Pegatron’s labor violations, which the group says lowers Pegatron’s costs. (Here’s a PDF of the full report.)
CLW cites no fewer than 86 labor rights violations, though it acknowledges it’s using that term broadly, breaking those numbers down into “36 legal violations and 50 ethical violations,” spread across 15 categories: “dispatch labor abuse, hiring discrimination, women’s rights violations, underage labor, contract violations, insufficient worker training, excessive working hours, insufficient wages, poor working conditions, poor living conditions, difficulty in taking leave, labor health and safety concerns, ineffective grievance channels, abuse by management, and environmental pollution.”
“Average weekly working hours in the three factories probed by CLW are approximately 66 hours, 67 hours, and 69 hours,” CLW says—this, despite China’s 49-hour statutory limit, and Apple’s own Supplier Code of Conduct limiting suppliers to a 60-hour workweek. CLW claims further that its undercover investigators found workers “were forced to sign forms indicating that their overtime hours were less than” they had actually worked.
Reports from The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere indicated that Apple turned to Pegatron earlier this year to manufacture as-yet unannounced and unreleased lower cost iPhones. Pegatron had previously made a small subset of iPhones in 2011, and began manufacturing the iPad mini in 2012, the Journal reports.
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