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.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Updated 4/9/2012 with information about Dell’s work with Foxconn.

Apple has been rightly criticized for the labor conditions in the factories that make its iPhones, iPads and Macs.

When Apple joined the Fair Labor Association, the group investigated the factories Apple uses, the most famous of which is Foxconn. The report found cases of excessive overtime, unsafe working conditions, and instances when workers weren’t paid the wages due to them. Apple has vowed to fix those problems.

But other manufacturers have done far less. As I wrote in February, Motorola, Nokia, and many other electronics manufacturers also use the same factories, at Foxconn and elsewhere, but have done nothing publicly regarding working conditions there. Toshiba, HP, Dell, and Sony all use factories the New York Times reports as “bleak.” And today, the Times’ Nick Bilton reports on his efforts to get Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Lenovo to provide statements on the conditions in the factories they employ. With one exception, their responses can be summed up in two words: No comment.

Most of the manufacturers contacted by Bilton provided little to no relevant information about work conditions in the overseas manufacturing factories they employ. Dell said that it had conducted audits and walkthroughs of the Foxconn factory within the last 60 days, and said that it was working with Foxconn to improve the health and welfare of Foxconn employees.

“Although some technology companies share some information about their audits, none go into detail about the violations they find or what they are doing to fix problems,” Bilton writes. None of them have joined the Fair Labor Association, though some of them said they belong to the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition, a group that has made little material difference to the electronics supply chain since its founding in 2004, a source interviewed by Bilton claims.

Actually, the Fair Labor Association, which was formed by shoe and clothing manufacturers to audit alleged sweatshop conditions in their own factories, has been accused of being the same kind of public relations fig leaf. Say what you will about the FLA, though, its report on Foxconn was not sugar-coated. The FLA made the report public and Apple responded publicly, vowing to improve conditions. Apple chief executive Tim Cook even let himself be photographed touring Foxconn in March (see photo above).

For a company that’s famously secretive, that’s an astounding level of openness. Why aren’t other manufacturers following suit?

Read the full story: While Apple Is Criticized for Foxconn, Other Companies Are Silent

Photo credit: Tim Cook touring Foxconn. Photo courtesy Apple.

Apple CEO Tim Cook made his first trip on Thursday to a Chinese Foxconn production facility that is charged with making the company’s ultra popular iPhones.

Cook’s visit comes after weeks of accusations that employees of the Foxconn plant(s) were the victims of inhuman working conditions, low wages, and unreasonably long shifts. Those same claims, also perpetuated by This American Life’s interview with activist Mike Daisy, caused quite an uproar from Apple’s customers. It even sparked protests outside Apple retail stores and petitions calling for the company to end its relationship with many of its manufacturing partners.

While Daisy’s claims about Foxconn’s labor practices were later revealed to be mostly fabricated, Apple apparently got the message from its customers.

It’s likely that Cook’s visit is part of a new effort by the company to find out more about its manufacturing partners. According to a Reuters report, Cook was seen in pictures smiling and shaking hands with employees at the Foxconn Zhengzhou Technology Park facility, which employs 120,000 people.

China is a very important part of Apple’s business. The country is home to several factories that build its products, like the iPhone, iPods, iPads, and others. China is also Apple’s biggest market overall. Apple is currently selling the iPhone through Chinese wireless carriers China Telecom and China Unicom, but it has yet to strike a deal with the country’s largest carrier, China Mobile. (That could change when China Mobile upgrades to LTE.)

Cook’s trip also included meetings with Vice Premier Li Keqiang, the mayor Beijing, and a visit to Apple’s largest retail stores in the country, according to the Reuters report.

Photo credit: Apple

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In a statement released Friday, the Taiwan-based manufacturing giant Foxconn said that base pay for junior workers was being raised to 1800 yuan per month and could go up to 2500 for those who passed a technical examination, reports Reuters.

“As a top manufacturing company in China, the basic salary of junior workers in all of Foxconn’s China factories is already far higher than the minimum wage set by all local governments,” the company’s statement said. “We will provide more training opportunities and learning time, and will continuously enhance technology, efficiency and salary, so as to set a good example for the Chinese manufacturing industry.”

The 1800 yuan works out to around $280 a month. This is the third raise workers have received since the beginning of 2010.

The working conditions at Foxconn came under attack recently in an article from The New York Times. Apple CEO Tim Cook at first responded by calling the reports “offensive” in a letter to employees, which was leaked to the press. But earlier this week, Apple changed its tune, calling for a new series of independent investigation into Foxconn by the Washington D.C. based Fair Labor Association, a group partially funded by Apple.

Those new inspections are already being called into question, however, after the president of the FLA, Auret van Heerden, praised the conditions at Foxconn, saying after only a few days that “facilities are first-class” and “Foxconn is really not a sweatshop.”

“Generally, in a labor rights investigation, the findings come after the evidence is gathered, not the other way around,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, told The New York Times. “I’m amazed that the F.L.A. would give one of the most notoriously abusive factories in the world a clean bill of health — based, it appears, on nothing more than a guided tour provided by the owner.”

Mike Daisey, monologist and Apple critic

Apple released a statement to the press this morning about new labor condition audits it had asked for at Foxconn, the Cupertino company’s most infamous Chinese manufacturer.

Mike Daisey, an actor and monologist whose reporting and theatrical work has brought increased scrutiny to Apple’s labor practices, says the timing of the announcement is big news in and of itself.

“This isn’t new information,” Daisy told VentureBeat. “They talked about this work with the Fair Labor Association almost a month ago. But they buried it in a small note on a Friday before a holiday weekend. Doing this on a Monday morning with a big press release means they are reacting, because they see that their brand is in real danger.”

The specifics of the announcement are encouraging to Daisey. “They have gone from five percent of their supply chain being audited and the results being private to the entire supply chain and public reports, so that is progress,” he said.

But there is still a lot he would like to see improved. “These are announced inspections and, as I learned during my time in Chinese factories, those don’t work very well. They simply pull underage and overworked employees off the line when they know inspectors are coming.”

Apple’s rapidly expanding market cap, says Daisey, may be the key to progress on labor reform. “They have the resources right now to transform their supply chain. I know because I spent the last few years studying it. If Apple leads, other brands will follow. The pressure is clearly effecting them, so we just have to keep pushing.”

He is also waiting to see what these new reports look like before deciding how effective the additional audits might be. “Apple was lauded in the press for releasing their entire supply chain along with violations. But when you looked closely, that report didn’t show which suppliers were connected with which violation,” Daisey noted. “Apple is very good at PR, so I have learned to take everything they say with a healthy chunk of salt.”

Photo of Mike Daisey courtesy Mike Daisey.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Last month saw several big stories on poor working conditions at the factories in China where makes Apple products. Chief executive Tim Cook initially responded by saying that Apple had nothing to apologize for. Now Apple has announced a series of special “voluntary audits” at Foxconn factories in Shenzen and Chengdu, China by the Fair Labor Association.

It’s the first big step by Apple to be proactive about the horrendous working conditions at its suppliers.

“We believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers,” Cook said in a statement today. “The inspections now underway are unprecedented in the electronics industry, both in scale and scope, and we appreciate the FLA agreeing to take the unusual step of identifying the factories in their reports.”

Cook previously responded directly to a damning story in the New York Times in a letter to Apple employees, saying that, “Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are.”

But momentum continued to build for Apple to take action. Last week activists delivered a petition with 250,000 signatures to the Apple store in Grand Central.

A former Apple executive quoted in the New York Times story said that, “Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”