23 Died Building Your iWorld: Time to Boycott Apple?
If you add up all the workers who have died to build your iPhone or iPad, the number is shockingly high.
Apple (AAPL), at $416 billion it’s the world’s most valuable tech company, gets you to feel good about paying $600 for an iPad. And despite being priced more than twice as high as Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, people bought 15.4 million iPads (14% above analysts’ estimates) in the last quarter.
But those popular devices come at a human price — some of the low-paid workers who built them got their skin burned off or jumped to their deaths. Would you be willing to boycott Apple to stop the carnage?
Thursday morning, the New York Times published the results of a lengthy investigation into the manufacturing practices of Apple suppliers, Chengdu, China-based Foxconn and Wintek. Adding up the carnage from a combination of factory explosions and suicides cited in the article, 23 people died to build your iPhone or iPad and 273 were injured.
Of these, the most horrible reported by the Times was Lai Xiaodong — a college educated manager who was planning to marry. Mr. Lai’s face was burned off along with the skin on 90% of his body thanks to a May 2011 explosion at an iPad factory caused by a well-known problem — an abundance of aluminum dust — where he managed a team of workers polishing iPad screens. Mr. Lai took two days to die of his burns.
But the toll of death and injury from building your iWorld includes more people, such as:
19 who committed suicide at the Foxconn factory by “jumping or falling” off of its factory or dormitory buildings between 2008 and 2010;
Four – including Mr. Lai — who died in two factory explosions at Foxconn and another 77 who were injured in them; and
137 Wintek workers injured due to the use of a fast-evaporating chemical used to polish iPad screens; and
59 injured during a December 2011 Foxconn plant explosion in Shanghai.
Does Apple care about this? It absolutely appears to care about the impact it could have on its image among those self-congratulating customers who think so highly of themselves as they run their fingers over the carefully polished screens of their high-priced handheld devices.
To that end, the Times reports that Apple has conducted supplier audits and published the results on its web site. At the same time, Apple pushes its suppliers to manufacture huge volumes with little notice at very low costs and razor-thin profit margins. And every year it requires those suppliers to reduce their prices by 10%, reports the Times.
Needless to say, this is good for Apple’s bottom line. Earlier this week, it reported 73% growth in revenues to $46.3 billion and profit of $13.1 billion for the quarter — more than double the year before’s. And Apple’s market value is now at $416 billion, making it the world’s most valuable technology company.
Since you’re already paying such a high premium for the privilege of owning an Apple product, would you mind paying even more for Apple to take enough pressure off of its suppliers so they could treat their workers more like people? Or would you be willing to go on a buyer’s strike to get Apple to require its suppliers to give workers a safe place to work and reasonable working conditions?
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