Mainly Macintosh

Apple - Report on iPod Manufacturing

Everyone knows Apple Computer's popular iPod MP3 players are made in China. And by far, most MP3 players sold today are iPods.

Well, there was a bit of a flap earlier this summer when word came out that the workers who build these popular - and some quite expensive - iPods, make very little money themselves.

Worse, apparently a substantial percentage of the money they make goes back into their employer's pockets. The employer sells the employees food, rents them housing, and so forth.

In one sense, you could look at it as a modernization and employment outreach program.

On the other hand, you could look at it as a company town. Last I heard company towns were illegal in the U.S., owing to abuses by those employers who ran them around the era of the great depression.

Workers in company towns never quite seemed to earn enough money to be able to leave and get another job. The small salary or wage they were paid got reabsorbed back into the company in the form of food sales, housing, and so forth. Essentially, the employees not only provided labor but were also another revenue source for the corporation.

Apple - Report on iPod Manufacturing:

The manufacturing facility supports over 200,000 employees (Apple uses less than 15% of that capacity) and has the services you%u2019d expect in a medium city. The campus includes factories, employee housing, banks, a post office, a hospital, supermarkets, and a variety of recreational facilities including soccer fields, a swimming pool, TV lounges and Internet cafes. Ten cafeterias are also located throughout the campus offering a variety of menu choices such as fresh vegetables, beef, seafood, rice, poultry, and stir-fry noodles. In addition, employees have access to 13 different restaurants on campus.

The accusations leveled against Apple of indirectly creating, or at least fostering, a company town were pretty direct and included some specific numbers on wages - which were quite low by U.S. standards.

They did not convey much of the big picture however. While not really addressing the numbers in the original complaint, Apple does put the situation into the context of the whole facility.

Apple is a minority client of the gigantic facility in China. Nearly 30,000 people work on making Apple products there. However, more than 170,000 people working at the facility on other products for other vendors, not Apple.

Apple's report also makes it sound like the number of hours that employees worked kind of do evoke images of a sweatshop. If I interpret them correctly, employees are typically getting 3 days off a month. In the U.S., we have taken for granted for almost a century that employees theoretically get 8 days off per month.

In the short haul, it may not make much of a difference. But over time, month after month, year after year, those several extra days per month could possibly make or break someone. Especially, considering they tend to be working over ten hours per day, it sounds like.

On the flip side, maybe they do not have a long commute home. I have read of people who work in California and drive a few hours each way, 5 times a week. They commute between their California offices and their Oregon homes. They cannot afford the high cost of decent housing/living in northern California, and they cannot find the kind of employment they want in Oregon.

Hours of driving is certainly work too. I never heard of anyone being compensated for it either, if it is not part of their actual job description; e.g. truck driver.

I am not equivalencing the two things, I am not at all sure that driving 5-6 hours per day, plus working 8 hours per day in an office on top of that, is all that healthy or safe.

Apple's report makes some things sound better than the original complaint, without seeming to distort the facts.

Ironically, in some ways the Apple report mentions a few other concerns the original one did not mention. Some of them are significant, some probably not.

Too many details were left un-addressed in Apple's report to completely erase unease over the condition of workers. Maybe an expert could tell, especially if they were familiar with the overall conditions in the Chinese worker milieu, and the general trends in the economy for individuals there.

Really, it will not be possible to tell if people are well off until changes are made to bring the company into compliance with Apple's official policies protecting workers, and some time passes to see how people are doing compared to when they started working at the factory employing a fifth of a million workers.

One thing that cannot be argued: the numbers of workers, products made/sold, and revenue/profits are huge. And the numbers paid out in manufacturing wages to individuals is tiny.

Depending on your point of view, that is either ideal or deplorable. Either way, it is what it is.

Hopefully, people will benefit from Apple's scrutiny. There is some correlation between a worker's quality of life and the quality of the product that winds up in a consumer's hand. So Apple paying attention to these details and the big picture might benefit everyone involved, not just the obvious parties.

posted by John Collins @ 1:49 PM