Last week, Apple published a report on the working conditions of its partners' employees and admitted that a good part of them do not comply with the labor laws of the countries where the factories are active. After the publication of this report, those from New York Times they got in touch with former directors of the Apple company and found out that Apple knew about these irregularities for years but chose to ignore them. They say that Apple's partners would change the way they work if they were asked to do so, but the company from Cupertino does not do this because it would probably increase production costs, so now it prefers to ignore the employees' problems.
We've known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they're still going on. Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn't have another choice. If you see the same pattern of problems, year after year, that means the company's ignoring the issue rather than solving it. Non-compliance is tolerated, as long as the suppliers promise to try harder next time. If we meant business, core violations would disappear. Once the deal is set and Foxconn becomes an authorized Apple supplier, Apple will no longer pay any attention to worker conditions or anything that is irrelevant to its products.
Practically, Apple knows about all the problems of its partners, but in order to keep the production costs as low as possible, it chooses to ignore them and continue the partnerships. The same decision is taken by any company in the same situation, so it should not surprise anyone what Apple does because it is not the first nor the last company to act in such a way.
