This week I told you that The BBC will broadcast a documentary in which it will present the difficult working conditions from the company's partner factories Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),, he having the name Apple's Broken Promises, the broadcast will take place this evening. Those from the BBC sent an undercover journalist to a factory of a partner of the Apple company and of course they discovered countless violations of the rights of employees on the production lines of components for Apple products.
It found standards on workers' hours, ID cards, dormitories, work meetings and juvenile workers were being breached at the Pegatron factories...Exhausted workers were filmed falling asleep on their 12-hour shifts at the Pegatron factories on the outskirts of Shanghai... One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work 18 days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off.
If in the image above we have employees who sleep on the production line after 12 hours of work, these are just a few of those who do not face the tough schedule, the factories in China also have minors employed to manufacture products. Pegatron is the company that owns the factory where the image above was recorded, it being located near Shanghai, where components for Apple products are manufactured by employees who work 12 hours a day for up to 18 consecutive days.
"We are aware of no other company doing as much as Apple to ensure fair and safe working conditions... We work with suppliers to address shortfalls, and we see continuous and significant improvement, but we know our work is never done." Apple said it was a very common practice for workers to nap during breaks, but it would investigate any evidence they were falling asleep while working. It said it monitored the working hours of more than a million workers and that staff at Pegatron were averaging 55 hours a week.
Faced with these accusations, the Apple company said that it takes much more measures than competing companies to force its partners to respect the rights of employees, but it fails to offer them more than that. Apple is aware of the difficult working conditions in Chinese factories, but that it will continue to investigate cases in which their employees work until exhaustion to produce components dedicated to its products sold worldwide.
The full report from the BBC will be broadcast on BBC One at 21:00, UK time, and then probably many more secrets about the problems that Apple's partners have will be revealed.
