Pegatron is one of the partners Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), which assembles iDevices, but the working conditions in its factories are as bad as those in Foxconn. An independent audit recently carried out in the company's factories reveals the fact that the employees have bad living conditions, they don't get good enough equipment to protect them against the materials used in the manufacture of iDevices, they work too much and they don't always get their money. Moreover, the intermediate companies that hire them force them to work for a certain period of time in the Pegatron factories, otherwise they force them to pay fines, and once they get there, their identity documents are withheld to prevent them from leaving and getting hired elsewhere.
Recruitment firms, which are paid for each worker they refer, often take part of a worker's pay if the employee fails to work a fixed period and also sometimes fails to provide legally mandated insurance that Pegatron says it is paying the recruiters to provide, according to labor groups. One worker from Henan province surnamed Zhu said she was hired through an intermediary recruiting company, and has now found that she has to work for three months to avoid fines from the recruiter. THX. Zhu, who works on an iPhone assembly line, said she plans to leave the factory after three months. "They don't tell you everything," she said.
Despite these accusations, those from Apple claim in the documentation regarding the partners that their checks in recent months revealed only some of the problems, the company asking those from Pegatron to fix them. Now Apple is facing the problems it had last year with Foxconn, when the international press accused Apple of supporting a company that tortures factory workers. For the time being, the company has not responded to the accusations made by the agency that did this audit, and probably will not respond either, but its image could be seriously affected if the international press carefully analyzes the problem.
