FLA: Working conditions at Apple supplier plants are 'first-class'

By Damon Poeter

The factories where Apple's iPhones and iPads are assembled are "first-class" with working conditions that "are way, way above average of the norm" relative to other manufacturing facilities in mainland China, according to the president of a non-profit agency that began inspections of the plants this week.

Apple recently asked the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to investigate the facilities of its top eight manufacturing partners in China, starting with Foxconn, the main assembler of the company's popular consumer devices and the target of heavy criticism from labor rights groups.

Auret van Heerden, president of the FLA, told Reuters Wednesday that he was impressed during his initial visits to Foxconn facilities.

"I was very surprised when I walked onto the floor at Foxconn, how tranquil it is compared with a garment factory," he told the news agency. "So the problems are not the intensity and burnout and pressure-cooker environment you have in a garment factory. It's more a function of monotony, of boredom, of alienation perhaps."

Van Heerden was referring to a string of worker suicides at Foxconn plants in recent years, which spiked in 2010 and brought new scrutiny to the working conditions at the Chinese factories that churn out computer and consumer electronics products for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and other titans of the high-tech industry. He said such suicides were not unique to the plants where iPhones and iPads are made but have been tracked by the FLA since the 1990s at many facilities that employ young rural workers who are living away from their families for the first time.

"They're taken from a rural into an industrial lifestyle, often quite an intense one, and that's quite a shock to these young workers," van Heerden told Reuters. "And we find that they often need some kind of emotional support, and they can't get it."

The agency's inspection tour of Apple partners' facilities begins with a three-week tour of Foxconn's factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, the latter of which experienced a deadly explosion last year that is believed to have been caused by improper ventilation of aluminum dust.

About 30 FLA staffers will tour the Foxconn facilities and conduct anonymous interviews with a third of the 100,000 workers who work and live at the two plants, seeking information on their living conditions, emotional well-being, and whether Foxconn's agents in the rural areas where many workers are recruited are acting responsibly in the hiring process.

The FLA won't release an official preliminary report on its findings at the Foxconn plants until early March. Later, the agency will send inspectors to Chinese factories run by other contract suppliers used by Apple, including Quanta Computer, Pegatron, and WiFemme