For the first time, Apple listed all 156 of its
suppliers and manufacturing partners as a part of its
"Supplier Responsibility 2012 Progress Report."
The
report detailed Apple's efforts to monitor its
suppliers to make sure they're operating within legal
codes and its own policies regarding environmental
standards, occupational health and safety, and human
rights.
Apple's list of its suppliers for the iPhone, iPad and
other popular gadgets include Intel, Broadcom,
Amphenol and Sanyo Electric.
Apple has come under scrutiny in the past over
workplace problems with its suppliers, such as nearly
a dozen employees committing suicide at the Shenzhen,
China, plant of Foxconn in 2010.
Apple's audit program reaches all levels of our supply
chain, including final assembly and component
suppliers. At this year's report, Apple has added
more detailed and specialized audits to address safety
and environmental concerns.
Apple recently became the first technology company
accepted by the Fair Labor Association (FLA). The
company will also open its supply chain to the FLA?s
independent auditing team, who will measure its
suppliers' performance against the FLA's Workplace
Code of Conduct and the results will appear on their
website.
The tech giant said that its Supplier Responsibility
team conducted a total of 229 audits in 2011, which
was an 80% increase from 2010.
Apple also said that in 2011 it trained its 1
millionth supplier employee as a part of its "worker
empowerment program," which trains workers on Apple's
supplier standards as well as "their rights as
workers, occupational health and safety standards, and
more."
The company also found that just 38% of suppliers it
audited were in compliance with its policy of
no-more-than a 60-hour work week.
According to the report, 108 audited facilities "did
not pay proper overtime wages as required by laws and
regulations," Apple said. "For example, they did not
provide sufficient overtime pay for holidays." In
response to that finding, Apple says it required
suppliers to repay workers the wages they were due and
to "change their current payment system to prevent
recurrence."
The company also said it increased the amount of money
its suppliers paid out to workers to compensate for
migrant laborers paying outrageously high fees to
recruiters, middle-men and other companies just to get
a job making parts found in Apple goods.
"We increased audits in Malaysia and Singapore,
countries known to be destinations for foreign
contract workers," Apple said. "As a result, suppliers
reimbursed $3.3 million in excess foreign contract
worker fees, bringing the total that has been repaid
to workers since 2008 to $6.7 million."
Apple also said in the report that it found no
incidents of underage workers at its suppliers last
year and that it stopped doing business with one
supplier over a repeated "core violation" though the
company didn't say who the supplier was or what the
violation was.