Apple claims in its Supplier Responsibility 2014 Progress Report that it drove its “suppliers to achieve an average of 95 percent compliance with our maximum 60-hour work week”.<sup>8</sup> The International Labour Organization’s Convention C030 – Hours of Work recommends that the working week should not last longer than 48 hours. That Apple defines itself a standard of 60 hours for labour in its supply chain and prides itself for this fact shows that imperialism’s international division of labour is not just exploitative, but also racist in character: Apple assumes that for people in China 60 hours is an appropriate standard of working time.
Apple says that for its 2014 report it audited the working conditions of more than 1 million workers. It is however a fact that these audits are not conducted independently and that the results are also not reported independently. Apple does not rely on independent corporate watchdog organisations such as Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), but rather conducts studies that one can only consider to be biased. Workers who are studied by their own employers will certainly not report what they think is wrong because they are afraid to lose their job. Apple’s report is written in a style and language that conveys the impression that suppliers and local agencies that behave immorally are the problem: “Our suppliers are required to uphold the rigorous standards of Apple’s Supplier Code of Conduct, and every year we raise the bar on what we expect. […] We audit all final assembly suppliers every year”. That such behaviour is however driven by TNCs’ demand to produce cheaply and quickly is never mentioned. Apple uses the ideological strategy that it emphasises positive things about itself and negative things about suppliers in order to distort attention from its own responsibility for the exploitation of Chinese workers.
SACOM published in autumn 2014 a new report on working conditions at Apple’s supplier Pegatron in Jinagsu,<sup>9</sup> where tens of millions of the iPhone 6 have been manufactured. Undercover scholars conducted the research.
Chapter Eleven | Digital Labour and Imperialism
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The International Division of Digital Labour
8 https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple\_SR\_2014\_Progress\_Report.pdf, accessed on 22 December 2014.
9 See also the 2013 investigation by China Labor Watch: http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/report/68. A comparable case is the iPhone 6 assemblage at Jabi in Wuxi: http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/report/103