Apple report reveals child labour increase

Apple's annual report says 91 children worked at its suppliers in 2010, and 137 workers were poisoned by n-hexane
Tania Branigan in Beijing
The Guardian, Tuesday 15 February 2011

Photo caption: Apple said it had strengthened its checks on age because of concerns about falsification. Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

Apple found more than 91 children working at its suppliers last year, nine times as many as the previous year, according to its annual report on its manufacturers.

The US company has also acknowledged for the first time that 137 workers were poisoned at a Chinese firm making its products and said less than a third of the facilities it audited were complying with its code on working hours.

Apple usually refuses to comment on which firms make its goods, but came under increased scrutiny last year following multiple suicides at electronics giant Foxconn, one of its main suppliers.

Last month, anti-pollution activists accused the firm of being more secretive about its supply chain in China than almost all of its rivals.

The report says Apple found 91 children working at 10 facilities. The previous year it found 11 at three workplaces.

It ordered most to pay the children's education costs but fired one contractor which was using 42 minors and had "chosen to overlook the issue", the company said. It also reported the vocational school that had arranged the employment to the authorities for falsifying student IDs and threatening retaliation against pupils who revealed their ages.

Apple said it had strengthened its checks on age because of concerns about the falsification of ages by such schools and labour agencies. It also audited 127 facilities last year, mostly for the first time, compared with 102 in 2009.

The report shows a marked decrease in compliance on working hour requirements of a maximum 60-hour week with one day off. In 2009, only 46% met the standard; last year that fell to 32%.

Only 57% were compliant with its code on preventing working injuries and 70% or fewer met standards on air emissions, managing hazardous substances, and environmental permits and reporting.

But there were some signs of improvement in other areas. Compliance on wages and benefits improved from 65% in 2009 to 70%.

The report also says that 137 workers at a Suzhou supplier were poisoned by n-hexane, a hydrocarbon, last year. Previous reports had indicated 62 employees were affected and Apple had declined to answer repeated queries about the incident.

A spokesperson said it had "provided more transparency" regarding the company and Foxconn given recent concerns.

The report said Apple was "disturbed and deeply saddened" by the Foxconn deaths. Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, and other executives went to Shenzhen to see the facilities and the firm commissioned an independent review of conditions.

"I think it is positive that after such a long delay Apple has finally acknowledged the [n-hexane] problem," said Ma Jun of the Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, one of the organisations that criticised the US firm last month.

But he added: "This report shows that Apple is still not ready to accept public scrutiny ... We have listed the names of some Apple suppliers but there is no mention of them [here]."

Debby Chan, of Hong Kong's Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour campaign, said there was no way for others to monitor the behaviour of suppliers because Apple would not identify them or even say how many it had.

"I regard this report as a means of image-building rather than ensuring compliance with labour rights," she added.

Apple said that immigrant workers in countries such as Malaysia had been reimbursed $3.4m (£2.1m) in "exorbitant" recruitment fees since 2008 thanks to its checks. It has also increased efforts to crack down on the use of potential conflict minerals and expanded social responsibility training.

It is unusual in publishing its audit report and said 40% of the facilities audited last year said Apple was the first company to check them for social responsibility compliance.

The report also said that 99% of facilities met its freedom of association requirements.

But independent unions are not allowed on the Chinese mainland and Geoff Crothall, of Hong Kong's China Labour Bulletin, said: "It is Henry Ford-style freedom of association: You can have any union as long as it is [in] the Associated Federation of Trade Unions."

Last month, Apple reported record profits of $6bn for the fourth quarter of 2010.

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/15/apple-report-reveals-child-labour

Necessity Pushes Pakistani Women Into Jobs and Peril

By ADAM B. ELLICK
New York Times, Published: December 26, 2010

Photo caption: A supermarket provides transportation to female employees to protect them from harassment. Photo by Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

KARACHI, Pakistan — Dinner at Rabia Sultana’s house is now served over a cold silence. Her family has not spoken to her since May, when Ms. Sultana, 21, swapped her home life for a cashier’s job at McDonald’s.

Her conservative brother berated Ms. Sultana for damaging the family’s honor by taking a job in which she interacts with men — and especially one that requires her to shed her burqa in favor of a short-sleeved McDonald’s uniform.

Then he confiscated her uniform, slapped her across the face and threatened to break her legs if he saw her outside the home.

Her family may be outraged, but they are also in need. Ms. Sultana donates her $100 monthly salary to supplement the household budget for expenses that the men in her family can no longer pay for, including school fees for her younger sisters.

Photo caption:Rabia Sultana at McDonalds in Karachi. Photo by Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times.

Ms. Sultana is part of a small but growing generation of lower-class young women here who are entering service-sector jobs to support their families, and by extension, pitting their religious and cultural traditions against economic desperation.

The women are pressed into the work force not by nascent feminism but by inflation, which has spiked to 12.7 percent from 1.4 percent in the past seven years. As a result, one salary — the man’s salary — can no longer feed a family.

“It’s not just the economic need, but need of the nation,” said Rafiq Rangoonwala, the chief executive officer of KFC Pakistan, who has challenged his managers to double the number of women in his work force by next year. “Otherwise, Pakistan will never progress. We’ll always remain a third-world country because 15 percent of the people cannot feed 85 percent of the population.”

Female employment at KFC in Pakistan has risen 125 percent in the past five years.

Several chains like McDonald’s and the supermarket behemoth Makro, where the number of women has quadrupled since 2006, have introduced free transit services for female employees to protect them from harassment and to help persuade them take jobs where they may face hostility. “We’re a society in transition,” said Zeenat Hisam, a senior researcher at the Pakistan Institute of Labor Education and Research. “Men in Pakistan haven’t changed, and they’re not changing as fast as our women. Men want to keep their power in their hand.

“The majority of the people here believe in the traditional interpretation of Islam, and they get very upset because religious leaders tell them it’s not proper for women to go out and to work and to serve strange men.”

More than 100 young women who recently entered service jobs told of continual harassment.

At work, some women spend more time deflecting abuse from customers than serving them. On the way home, they are heckled in buses and condemned by neighbors. It is so common for brothers to confiscate their uniforms that McDonald’s provides women with three sets.

“If I leave this job, everything would be O.K. at home,” Ms. Sultana said. “But then there’d be a huge impact on our house. I want to make something of myself, and for my sisters, who are at home and don’t know anything about the outside world.”

So far, the movement of women into the service sector has been largely limited to Karachi. Elsewhere across Pakistan, women are still mostly relegated to their homes, or they take jobs in traditional labor settings like women-only stitching factories or girls’ schools, where salaries can be half of those in the service industry. Even the most trailblazing of companies, like KFC, still employ 90 percent men.

Pakistan ranked 133rd out of the 134 countries on the 2010 Global Gender Gap Report’s list of women’s economic participation.

While there is no reliable data on the number of women who specifically enter the service sector, Pakistan’s female work force hovers around 20 percent, among the lowest of any Muslim country.

Some women, like Saima, 22, are forced to lead secret lives to earn $175 a month. Her father’s shopkeeper’s salary does not cover the family’s expenses. Without a university degree, the only job Saima could find was at a call center of a major restaurant’s delivery department. But she impressed the manger so much that he offered her a higher-paying waitress job at a branch near her home.

She reluctantly agreed, but pleaded to be sent to a restaurant two hours away so she would not be spotted by family members and neighbors.

After three years, her family still thinks she works in the basement of a call center. On several occasions, she served old friends who did not recognize her without a head scarf. Her confidence has soared, but she is overwhelmed with guilt.

“I’ve completely changed myself here,” she said in the corner booth of her restaurant before her co-workers arrived. “But honestly, I’m not happy with what I’m doing.”

The women interviewed said they had to battle stereotypes that suggested that women who work were sexually promiscuous. Sometimes men misinterpret simple acts of customer service, like a smile. Fauzia, who works as a cashier at KFC, said that last year a customer was so taken with her smile that he followed her out the door and tried to force her into his car before she escaped.

Sunila Yusuf, a saleswoman who wears pink traditional clothes at home but skintight jeans at the trendy clothing boutique in the Park Towers shopping mall, said her fiancé had offered to pay her a $100 monthly wage if she would stay at home.

“He knows that Pakistani men don’t respect women,” she said.

Hina, who works the counter at KFC, said her brothers, who also work fast-food jobs, worried that she had become “too sharp and too exposed.”

“They can look at other people’s girls,” Hina said with a grimace. “But they want their own girls hidden.”

Mr. Rangoonwala, the KFC Pakistan executive, said: “Unfortunately, our society is a hypocritical society. We have two sets of rules, one for males and one for females.”

For Fauzia, the hardest part of the day is the 15-minute walk through the narrow alleys to reach her home. She wears a burqa to conceal her uniform, but word of mouth about her job has spread. Neighbors shout, “What kind of job is this?” as she briskly walks by with her head down.

As a solution, some companies spend up to $8,000 a month to transport their female workers in minivans.

A federal law, citing safety concerns, prohibits women from working after 10 p.m. It was extended from a 7 p.m. deadline last year.

Most companies, however, are unwilling to absorb the extra cost of employing women. Even most stores that sell purses, dresses, perfumes and jewelry do not employ women.

Kamil Aziz, who owns Espresso, the city’s most popular coffee chain, said he made it a point not to hire “the other gender” because women could not work the late shift and the turnover rate among women was higher. He said he also did not want to invest in separate changing rooms.

Nearly all of the 100 women interviewed said marriage would end to their careers. But many of them saw benefits along with the hazards.

Most women said that they had never left the house before taking a job. Many spent the first five months missing buses and getting lost. When they first arrived at work, they stuttered nervously in the presence of men.

Now they know better.

“I’ve learned never to take what husbands say at face value,” said Sana Raja Haroon, a saleswoman at Labels, a clothing boutique where men sometimes slide her their business card.

But the employed women are also approached by admiring young women who want to follow their lead.

“Girls envy us,” said Bushra, a KFC worker. “We are considered the men of the house, and that feels good.”

URL: http://tinyurl.com/2bljdsp

Search ends for missing fishing crew in Antarctic

Search crews from New Zealand have called off the hunt for 17 missing fishermen from a South Korean trawler that sank in the Southern Ocean.
BBC, 14 December 2010

Photo caption: It is not clear what caused the No 1 In Sung to sink

Five of the 42-man crew died and 20 were rescued after the No 1 In Sung went down about 2,000km (1,250 miles) south of New Zealand.

It sank at about 0630 New Zealand time on Monday (1930 GMT) in calm waters.

The crew included nationals from South Korea, China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Russia.

The 20 crew who were rescued were picked up by another fishing boat operating nearby.

Quick sinking

New Zealand rescuers said it was not clear why the boat sank. Conditions were calm and no SOS was sent.
Map

Search co-ordinator Dave Wilson said it was extremely unlikely anyone could survive in the icy waters for very long.

"Unfortunately the Southern Ocean is an extremely unforgiving environment.

"With the sea temperatures around two degrees Celsius, survival times for crew members in the water would be very short. The medical advice is that those who did not suffer cardiac arrest on entering the water would likely be unconscious after one hour, and unable to be resuscitated after two hours," he said.

"We understand the vessel sank very quickly and the crew had to abandon ship without time to put on adequate emergency gear. Sadly, it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone not picked up yesterday could have survived," he added.

A spokesman for the boat's owner, In Sung corporation, said the boat sank within 30 minutes.

"We are trying hard to find the reason why it sank so quickly," he told AFP news agency.

"We believe the vessel might have been hit by an iceberg or a strong wave, although we have yet to secure any evidence of this. We are now collecting information from the surviving crew."

Deconstructing Foxconn

Deconstructing Foxconn from Jack Qiu on Vimeo.

Bangladesh garment workers block roads

Thousands of Bangladeshi garment workers have been picketing factories and blocking roads, as they continue to demand a promised pay rise.
BBC, 13 December 2010

Photo caption: The unrest came a day after demonstrations shut down factories in southern Bangladesh

More than 4,000 workers blocked a main highway in the manufacturing northern district of Gazipur and demonstrated outside two plants near Dhaka.

On Sunday, three people died and scores were injured in the protests.

The unrest has paralysed the country's $15bn garment industry, which accounts for 80% of annual export earnings.

More than three million people, most of them women, work in Bangladesh's garment factories, which make clothes for major Western brands, including Wal-Mart, Marks & Spencer and Carrefour.

The workers say wages have not gone up, even though rises were due last month.

"They have blocked the main highway linking Dhaka to the north of the country," Khandaker Shafiqul Alam, police inspector at Gazipur, told news agency AFP on Monday.

The authorities later managed to clear the road without violence, although the protesters remained on either side of the route and the situation was said to be tense.

On Sunday, police used batons and tear gas to disperse protesters in Dhaka and the port city of Chittagong.

Garment workers attacked factories and smashed vehicles in the Chittagong Export Procession Zone.

Almost all factories in the zone have now re-opened after the protests, officials said.

Labour unions say many of the factories are not implementing the new salary scale announced by a government wage board earlier this year.

From November, the factories should have been paying a wage of at least $43 (£27) a month.

Around Dhaka, workers in some factories have been protesting for a number of days, demanding increased pay.

Pay and working conditions have long been a source of concern in the country.

URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11980438

Britain's high street chains are named by sweatshop probe

Marks & Spencer, Next, Monsoon, Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge accused by anti-poverty campaigners
By Gethin Chamberlain
The Observer, Sunday 12 December 2010

Photo caption: Workers sew at typical sweatshop. This one is in Guatemala City. Photograph: Jaime Puebla/AP

Some of the biggest names on the British high street use Indian sweatshops which pay poverty wages and break labour laws to keep costs to a bare minimum, according to a new report.

Marks & Spencer, Next, Monsoon, Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge are all named as having used factories which exploit their workers.

The allegations – levelled in a report by anti-poverty campaigners War on Want and Labour Behind the Label – will come as a particular embarrassment to M&S, which is running a glitzy, multi-million pound TV advertising campaign under the slogan "Don't put a foot wrong this Christmas". It is the second time this year the company has faced sweatshop allegations.

Some workers reported they were paid less than £60 a month while, in one factory, being regularly forced to work until 2am to produce clothes for British shoppers. Workers in another factory in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of the Indian capital Delhi, say it is not unusual for them to have to work an extra 140 hours a month for half the overtime rate they should receive.

The allegations come after a series of Observer investigations exposed the appalling conditions in which clothes, perfumes and accessories are produced for the British high street.

Ruth Tanner, War on Want campaigns and policy director, said: "It is utter hypocrisy that Marks & Spencer tells shoppers not to put a foot wrong at Christmas while Indian workers producing its clothes earn a pittance. While Christmas is a time for giving, M&S and the other retailers shamed are acting like Scrooge. For years British retailers have failed to keep their pledges on decent treatment for the people who make their clothes. It is high time the UK government stopped this abuse."

Sam Maher, a campaigner at the group Labour Behind the Label and author of the report, said: "Workers interviewed from these factories spoke of living in a climate of fear, where violence and systematic exclusion from rights was a daily reality. These conditions and their poverty wages are inexcusable. Brands sourcing from Gurgaon must take action to stop violence against unionised workers and make sure they pay prices that allow for a living wage."

The report – Taking Liberties: the Story Behind the UK High Street – lays bare the human cost of the sweatshop culture. It says workers in Gurgaon "are subject to systematic exploitation, violence and repression, long and stressful working hours, casual employment relationships, and exclusion from the social rights, protection and benefits they should be entitled to. Workers spoke of living in a climate of fear and insecurity." Researchers interviewed staff from two factories in Gurgaon, whose names have been withheld to protect them from any backlash.

Monsoon said that because the identity of the factory it is alleged to have used was unclear, it could not comment on the report. Debenhams and M&S said they took seriously any allegations that suggested a breach of their strict ethical standards, while Arcadia Group, which owns Miss Selfridge and Dorothy Perkins, said it welcomed research into labour standards and was working on new management systems and on tackling the issue of a living wage.

Next said it was already aware of problems in Gurgaon and was taking matters "very seriously indeed".

URL: http://tinyurl.com/23aevfg

How About Some Justice for Those Risking Their Safety Putting Thanksgiving Dinner on Our Tables?

By Charlotte Williams
Alternet, November 24, 2010

Turkey workers, primarily Latino, African American, Somali and Burmese, will find this increased production time particularly difficult.

Photo Credit: Photo Courtesy of U.S. Army


It’s that time of year again when people are busy planning and hosting seasonal celebrations that honor various cultural, religious and social traditions. Over the next six to eight weeks, gatherings will be held in homes, banquet halls, and houses of faith. Although the meaning of these celebrations may vary, rest assured, there will be plenty of good food on hand including ham, vegetables, fruits, nuts, dairy products of all kinds, and lots of turkeys.

While some families prepare to make their traditional holiday trek to enjoy time with family and friends, hundreds of thousands of low wage, immigrant food workers are sequestered in meatpacking, poultry processing and dairy plants, and laboring in fields in order to meet product demands for the celebrations set to commence this week. Turkey workers, primarily Latino, African American, Somali, Burmese and representatives of other immigrant and refugee communities, who come to this country to support their families, will find this increased production particularly difficult. Their experiences mirror the majority of food industry laborers who work to bring food to our tables.

It is estimated that 46 million turkeys were eaten at Thanksgiving and 22 million at Christmas in 2009, and food industry workers will labor countless hours over the next few weeks so that we can enjoy a variety of foods offered during this time of year. When seasonal processing kicks into overdrive, a sobering number of turkeys processed (some 30 turkeys a minute), it creates dangerous working conditions for the workers and compromises consumer food safety standards. However, in states where workers annually process some 60 million and over 40 million turkeys, North Carolina and Minnesota respectively, neither workers or consumer safety are the priority -- profits and dividends are. Poultry companies have even expanded turkey consumption beyond holiday dinner tables by creating new products, including deli-style breast meat and turkey dinosaur wings.

Evidence shows that worker safety is not the priority of the owners of processing plants. It’s difficult to grasp the depth of political wrangling among the government agencies charged with oversight of the industry particularly in the face of an urgent need to improve both the working conditions for turkey workers and the overall food safety standards for consumers. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of Food Safety Inspection (FSIS), regulates the maximum line speed of the slaughtering process, which has increased as the lines have become more automated. But it’s regulated only in order to allow federal officials to adequately inspect the process. On the other hand, the health and safety of plant workers (those harmed by those increased line speeds) is under the jurisdiction of the Office of Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) which includes training workers on safe worker practices and holding industry owners accountable for the safety, or lack thereof, of industry workers. That said, it’s time for unprecedented cooperation and accountability from the USDA, OSHA and plant owners in order to address some of the pressing issues in the food industry.

At the recent State of the Plate -- 2010 event, held November 17 in Chicago, conference planners sought to develop and share best practices, information, and strategies for creating a sustainable food supply in the region. Some panel participants (which included food producers, distributors, chefs, restaurant and hospitality professionals, decision makers, elected officials and other leaders), condemned the unjust treatment of food industry workers, the inhumane slaughter of animals, and the rampant greed of food industry giants who are in a race to produce the cheapest food.

Through its organizing efforts in several states and a new food justice initiative, the Center for New Community focuses on worker safety while confronting the racial structure of the food system in the U.S. Our food justice work envisions a food system supported by both ethical and just practices in order that everyone authentically shares in the bountiful harvest.