Apple has pledged to improve working conditions at the Chinese factories where many of its products get built, but is the company overlooking even more unpleasant abuses closer to home?
Sure, workers at Foxconn plants in China are subject to long hours doing tedious work for low wages, but how do we know that even worse human rights abuses aren't taking place down at 1 Infinite Loop?
Having followed Mike Daisey's exposé of Foxconn on This American Life, and then This American Life's exposé of Mike Daisey's exposé of Foxconn on This American Life, I decided to follow the Daisey school of theatrical journalism: Talk to a couple of people, pretend I talked to a lot more people, and call it a day.
Parked in a doughnut shop in Cupertino, California, I talked to the first person who would look me in the eye, a man named Rick Rollenstein who told me that he had worked at Apple for more than 20 years, helping to develop the first, blood-red iMac in 1992 and the original, six-pound iPod a year later. Currently, he told me, he is working on a prototype for the MacBook Space, the world's first weightless computer.
With such impressive and believable credentials, I asked him if perhaps he knew of any human rights abuses taking place in Apple's headquarters. He was reluctant to betray his employers until I slid a cruller across the table at him, at which point he opened up like a May rose. Here are only a few of the stories he told me, or that I wish he had told me.
- Salaried employees are sometimes asked to work long hours with nothing but comfortable couches, a well-stocked cafeteria and enormous paychecks to compensate them for this perfectly legal practice.
- Company beer bashes often run out of Gordon Biersch on tap and workers are forced to drink bottled Sam Adams instead.
- Workers as young as 3 are routinely employed to stack blocks and pretend to be zoo animals in the on-site Apple daycare center.
- You totally have to buy your own iPad. And the discount isn't that great.
- Nearly all employees are forced to work in an environment entirely without Windows.
- Bill, the project manager over in Building 3, makes that Windows joke like every other day.
- Upward of a hundred employees have committed suicide in late-night Team Fortress 2 games rather than let the other team get credit for a kill.
- When you tell someone at a party you work at Apple, they immediately tell you what's wrong with their iPhone, as if you're going to reprogram the interface right there next to the chocolate fountain.
- Many workers were forced, in violation of all international standards of human rights, to work on MobileMe.
- Every month, at least two workers are crushed to death under the weight of the company's enormous market cap.
- The on-site jai alai court is only cleaned twice a day.
- Seriously, Cupertino? What, Cleveland was too glitzy?
- Programmers, engineers and designers do all the work; Apple Store employees with fauxhawks get all the babes.
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Photo: Just how bad are working conditions for Apple?
Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg overcame these handicaps to become an investor, an inventor and an invertebrate.
Opinion Editor: John C. Abell @johncabell
