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Heat Turning Up On Apple After 'Nightline' Broadcast

This article is more than 10 years old.

Protests are planned for Apple's annual shareholders meeting tomorrow.

The leader of one of the protest groups pressuring Apple to improve conditions for workers in the Chinese factories that assemble Apple products, says last night’s ABC News Nightline broadcast did nothing to dampen efforts by her organization, SumOfUs.org, to protest Apple’s practices.

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, founder and president of the three-month-old, Washington, D.C.-based group, says she and other groups are organizing protests to take place tomorrow morning at Apple’s general shareholders meeting on the company’s corporate campus in Cupertino, Calif.  Stinebrickner-Kauffman says protesters plan to rally outside the meeting, and also hope to get inside, and put questions about labor practices directly to Apple’s executives.

Together with Change.org, SomeOfUs has collected more than 250,000 signatures on petitions calling on Apple to improve the conditions of overseas workers. Today the AFL-CIO's  president Richard Trumka, sent an email out to  members, with a link to sign its own petition calling on Apple to improve supply chain working conditions. Stinebrickner-Kauffman says a representative from her group hopes to deliver a stack of petitions to Apple executives during the meeting tomorrow. SomOfUs, Change.org and local chapters of United Students Against Sweatshops have been using social media to call for protesters to make a showing at Apple headquarters tomorrow.

Though Stinebrickner-Kauffman says she’s glad Nightline covered the issue, she points out that workers interviewed on camera, at work, where they are trying to keep their jobs, are unlikely to be forthcoming about onerous conditions. “It’s of extremely limited utility in assessing the situation,” she says.

You can watch the Nightline segment here. It shows dozens of young workers, many of whom appear to be teenagers, dressed in protective clothing and toiling silently under fluorescent lights, assembling Apple products like iPhones and iPads.  Nightline notes that other electronics makers like Dell and Nintendo, also use Foxconn to manufacture electronics products. But Apple has been singled out by protesters because of its size, profitability and dominance in the industry.

On camera, workers say they want higher wages, and more comfortable dormitories. Nightline also shows cramped dorm rooms, which sleep eight workers in bunk beds. Company dorms house more than 200,000 of the 400,000-plus workers who work at Foxconn’s factory in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.  Also visible in the Nightline broadcast: the suicide nets Foxconn has strung around the entire plant, to discourage workers from leaping from the roof to their deaths.  In 2010, at least a dozen workers jumped from the roofs of Foxconn factories.

Stinebrickner-Kauffman is critical of the non-profit group, the Fair Labor Association, which Apple has invited to audit most of its manufacturing facilities in China. She points out that Apple is a member of the association, and the company is funding the audit.

Her chief demand: Apple should make sure its suppliers are abiding by Apple’s own Supplier Code of Conduct. Among the requirements of the Code: employees should work no more than 60 hours a week, and no workers should be under age 15, or under the age of completing compulsory education in that country.  A report earlier today from Apple Insider quotes a project officer at Chinese watchdog group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) as saying that Foxconn transferred underage workers to other locations before the FLA audit started, and also cut back on overtime, so as not to run afoul of the auditors.

ABC Nightline’s Bill Weir had been asking Apple to shoot inside its Chinese factories for years. At the same time that it granted FLA permission to audit most of its supply factories, Apple finally reached out to Weir and invited him to shoot at Foxconn. The Nightline crew accompanied the FLA group for part of its inspection. “ABC News had full permission from the executives,” says Stinebrickner-Kauffman. “There was no element of surprise. You can’t really find out what’s going on under those conditions.”