HP has given direction to its Chinese suppliers that the use of temporary and student workers should be limited and should not be forced.

While child labor has plagued HP competitor Apple’s manufacturing facilities in the PRC, HP is addressing a separate issue: legal-aged workers who are required by local governments and school administrators to work in factories when orders from overseas surge.

Students in high school can be required to work overly long hours on tasks that have nothing to do with their chosen fields of study. More sinister still, the factories often give school administrators a financial kickback for the students’ labor.

Now, HP told The New York Times, it’s trying to make sure that work corresponds to students’ area of study and that both temporary workers and student workers at least feel free “to leave work at any time upon reasonable notice without negative repercussions, and they must have access to reliable and reprisal-free grievance mechanisms.”

Enforcing these demands will undoubtedly prove problematic and will require more audits and supervision of suppliers, as Apple has found over the years. After more than a year of concentrated effort and investigation, the iPhone maker is still finding underage workers at its suppliers’ plants in China.

Lest we jump to the conclusion that our Chinese manufacturing counterparts are purely evil slavedrivers, let’s take a look at the past few decades of Chinese labor. The PRC’s one-child policy is, as of 2011, starting to have a measurable impact on the country’s workforce.

A census conducted in 2010 showed the country’s population was then half urban and aging quickly because fewer children were being born. And in 2012, the available workforce for labor shrunk for the first time by 3.45 million year-over-year, again due to the one-child policy.

The shrinking Chinese labor force trend is expected to continue at least through 2030, and the National Population and Family Planning Commission has stated the one-child policy will remain in effect at least through 2018. More and more elderly folks in the PRC will require care from younger citizens, and less migrant labor from rural areas will be available.

Given China’s place in the world of manufacturing, it’s a small wonder the PRC’s plants and factories are turning to drastic measures to meet Western demands. The real question is what we all can do to alleviate the pressure on China’s workforce from external sources as well as the country’s own internal crises.

Image credit: Imaginechina/Corbis

Has Samsung supplier HEG Electronics been using child labor in its factories? According to results from Samsung’s audits, no way.

“Samsung investigators did not identify any underage workers during the site audit at HEG Electronics in Huizhou, but we identified workers under the age of 18 on site,” the company said.

Samsung’s findings are a big departure from those of watchdog group China Labor Watch,which said last month that it found seven child laborers working in the HEG Electronics factory. Why the discrepancy?

China Labor Watch director Li Qiang offered one explanation: “I think this means that their auditing system has many problems.”

In particular, Qiang said Samsung essentially warned HEG Electronics that its investigators were coming. This gave the factory enough time to move or fire its underage workers before Samsung could start interviewing them, Qiang said in a statement to VentureBeat.

While these are tough allegations to verify, Samsung does note in its report that HEG Electronics’ high turnover rate made it tough to fully audit the company. So it’s clear that the investigation could have been more extensive.

Child labor aside, Samsung’s investigation did find a few problems. For one, factory workers were in some cases working nine hours per day, beyond legal limits. The factory was also fining workers for being late and did not offer access to a medial clinic.

As a result of its findings, Samsung is giving HEG Electronics two options: Either improve factory conditions or risk losing Samsung as a client. The company plans to expand its investigations to other suppliers over the next few weeks.

Apple has released a list of hardware component suppliers (and many of their human rights and environmental violations) as part of its 2012 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report.

This list, the company says, accounts for more than 97 percent of Apple’s procurement expenditures for materials, manufacturing, and assembly of iPads, iPhones, iPods, MacBooks and various other personal computing products worldwide.

In this year’s report, Apple says it conducted more audits of manufacturers than ever — 229 audits altogether for various partners along Apple’s supply chain. The number of audits represents an 80 percent increase over audits conducted in 2010 and includes more than 100 first-time audits.

While the company says it has educated more than a million employees at Apple’s manufacturing partners around the world about worker’s rights, on-the-job safety and more, the audits unearthed some ugly facts about the companies making iDevice components.

In Chinese partners, Apple’s investigations found issues with payment of workers, benefits for workers and environmental practices. Some suppliers were found dumping waste-water at a farm near the plant, using unsafe machinery, forging payroll records and even administering pregnancy tests to some workers.

Perhaps most troubling of all from a human rights perspective is the continuing instances of child and involuntary labor in Apple’s supply chain. Although Apple says it maintains a a zero-tolerance policy for such labor and that the 2011 audits concluded instances of child labor “were down significantly,” the company can only verify that no underage workers were found at final assembly suppliers.

“I would like to totally eliminate every case of underage employment,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told reporters.

“As we go deeper into the supply chain, we found that age verification system isn’t sophisticated enough. This is something we feel very strongly about and we want to eliminate totally.”

In a email sent today to Apple staff, Cook wrote, “We are taking a big step today toward greater transparency and independent oversight of our supply chain by joining the Fair Labor Association.

“The FLA is a leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving conditions for workers around the world, and we are the first technology company they’ve approved for membership. The FLA’s auditing team will have direct access to our supply chain and they will report their findings independently on their website.”

While it seems Apple is trying to tackle these overarching issues of international business and manufacturing, we are nevertheless disturbed by many of the things in this report. After all, 78 percent compliance with involuntary labor requirements still means 22 percent noncompliance, which translates to coercion and debt bondage being part of how your your iPhone was made.

Still, all our electronics come from plants such as these. At least Apple is making an effort to be transparent about the process, to find violations, to correct those violations, and in some cases, to stop doing businesses with companies that consistently ignore human rights and environmental regulations.

Here are other interesting parts of the report, as well as some graphs we created showing percentage of compliance, based on data from the report:

Overwork

93 facilities had records that indicated more than 50 percent of their workers exceeded weekly working hour limits of 60 in at least 1 week out of the 12 sample period. At 90 facilities, more than half of the records we reviewed indicated that workers had worked more than 6 consecutive days at least once per month, and 37 facilities lacked an adequate working day control system to ensure that workers took at least 1 day off in every 7 days.

Inadequate pay

42 facilities had payment practice violations, including delayed payment for employees’ wages and no pay slips provided to employees. 67 facilities used deductions from wages as a disciplinary measure. 108 facilities did not pay proper overtime wages as required by laws and regulations.

Slave & child labor

Two facilities were repeat offenders in the category of involuntary labor. Apple’s report states, “We terminated business with one supplier and are correcting the practices of the other supplier.”

[In] 15 facilities… we discovered foreign contract workers who had paid excessive recruitment fees to labor agencies… Some of our suppliers work with third-party labor agencies to hire contract workers from countries such as the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. These agencies, in turn, may work through multiple subagencies in the hiring country, the workers’ home country, and, in some cases, all the way back to the workers’ home village. By the time the workers have paid all fees across these agencies, the total cost can equal many months’ wages, forcing workers into debt…

We discovered a total of 6 active and 13 historical cases of underage labor at 5 facilities. In each case, the facility had insufficient controls to verify age or detect false documentation. We found no instances of intentional hiring of underage labor.

Health & safety

126 facilities did not have the appropriate administrative documentation or approval for at least one item in the health and safety protocol. Examples included workers who performed certain tasks without the legally required licenses, expired elevator permits, and lack of labeling of maximum load for shelving. 78 facilities had at least one instance where a workstation or a machine was missing the appropriate safety device such as a gear guard, pulley guard, or interlock. 58 facilities had workers who were not wearing appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE), such as earplugs, safety glasses, and dust masks. In some instances, the facility had not provided the appropriate
safety equipment. In others, the workers neglected to use the equipment or were using it improperly. Also, 72 facilities lacked procedures for PPE management.