Skip to main content

Apple is investigating a report that illegal student labor was used to build Apple Watches

By

Apple is looking into its Apple Watch supply chain after a report published last week claimed its manufacturer relied on student interns to complete the devices, according to the Financial Times. Sacom, a human rights group, claims Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese Apple supplier, employed students illegally and required them to work overtime and nightshifts with only one day off per week. Sacom says Quanta exclusively manufactures the Apple Watch Series 1, 2, and 4, and is the main manufacturer of the Series 3.

The group says it interviewed 28 high school students at the Quanta Computer factory in Chongqing, China this summer. Most of them were aged between 16 and 18 and performed rote tasks on the production line.

The students claim their teachers told them they wouldn’t be able to graduate on time without this work. One student majoring in auto repair told the group: “I told my teacher I do not want to do this job. He then called my father and talked to him for more than an hour. My father then pressured me, so I had no choice but to come.”

Sacom claims that many of the students’ majors had nothing to do with electronics, and that they saw no benefit from this internship that involved assembling parts for 12 hours a day, sometimes from 8PM to 8AM. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the story, but in the meantime, the company issued a statement to the Financial Times and said:

“We are urgently investigating the report that student interns added in September are working overtime and night shifts. We have zero tolerance for failure to comply with our standards and we ensure swift action and appropriate remediation if we discover [supplier code] violations.”

We’ll update if we hear more from Apple.



from The Verge - Teches https://ift.tt/2PZTIiQ
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The PlayStation Classic has a secret debug menu that can be reached with specific keyboards

By
Just a day after the release of the PlayStation Classic , the Retro Gaming Arts YouTube channel has discovered that you can access the emulator’s settings menu by plugging a keyboard into a free USB slot and hitting the Esc key. Doing so reveals a host of settings for the built-in open-source PCSX ReARMed emulator, potentially allowing access to options, including save states, controls, and cheats. The discovery has raised hope that some of the criticisms of the retro console , such as a limited game library and poor image quality, could soon be addressed with third-party modding. In the discovered menus, an option to “Load CD Image” is clearly visible, which suggests it might be possible to load additional games or perhaps just the better-performing 60Hz NTSC variants. An option to enable scanlines, the horizontal lines that allow an LCD screen to emulate the look of a traditional CRT monitor, is also present. Despite the discovery, it’s unlikely that the hardware limitations o
Post a Comment
Read more

With Toys R Us gone, Amazon wants to send out a holiday toy catalog of its own

By
Now that Amazon has helped kill off Toys R Us , it wants to borrow the retailer’s iconic print holiday toy catalog . The online behemoth is interested in creating its own print catalog to mail out and also be handed out at Whole Foods (which it owns), according to Bloomberg . Toys R Us was plagued with billions in debt when permanently closed last month — in part because of competition from online stores like Amazon . For many kids, its “Big Book” toy catalog was a staple of fall. The 100-page catalog would arrive near the end of October for kids to look through and create a wishlist before December. Now that the retailer is done, various companies are trying to scoop up the customers that headed to their shelves every December. Party City, for example, will open 50 pop-up toy shops for the holidays. Target will have more store space for toys . It’s just especially amusing that Amazon, having helped kill off these physical retailers, is trying to learn from them to make even mor
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazon’s plans for a New York office are under new scrutiny

By
A month ago, when Amazon announced that it would build regional offices in New York and Virginia at great expense to the taxpayers there, I wrote that it had misunderstood the moment : Perhaps the furor over Amazon’s regional offices will blow over. But it’s hard not to feel today as if the company misread the room — overestimating the public’s appetite for a billion-dollar giveaway to one of the world’s biggest companies, and underestimating the public’s ability to raise hell on- and offline. Amazon may yet feel that pain, in the long run. Today, Amazon met the room: 150 protesters who showed up to the first New York City Council hearing about the plan. According to reports from the scene, demonstrators’ concerns start with the $3 billion in incentives that New York plans to give Amazon in exchange for locating there — and, it says, creating 25,000 jobs. Here’s Leticia Miranda in BuzzFeed : ”You’re worth a trillion dollars,” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson told the
Post a Comment
Read more