CounterPunch spells out, in the clearest of terms, why there is hypocrisy in the PR statements coming from US, and other corporations, who rely on workers in foreign countries - laboring under conditions which would not be tolerated in Western countries - producing various products. The most notable recent example has been the so-called exposé in The New York Times relating to Apple.
While Apple and its competitors know they must pay lip service to concern for worker rights, lest their brand’s image be tarnished, the practical reality is that if worker rights were genuinely respected in places like China, production costs would be higher, deliver times slower, and profits correspondingly lower. The last thing these brands want is for any of the countries where they exploit low-wage labor to actually enforce their own workplace laws, much less comply with international standards.
This is why there is a yawning gap between the public rhetoric of these corporations on labor rights issues and the actual manner in which they operate their supply chains. Their public statements are suffused with pious expressions of concern for workers and accounts of ostensibly strenuous efforts to promote labor rights compliance by their suppliers. In practice, these corporations maintain a production model that routinely exploits the very labor abuses they claim to abhor. The Times reporters exposed this mammoth hypocrisy, on the part of the world’s most revered and profitable company, by getting former Apple executives to speak candidly (albeit anonymously) on the subject – the kind of enterprising effort to pierce the corporate public relations veil that is seen all too rarely in mainstream journalism.
Here is new Apple CEO Tim Cook, articulating the company’s official position – that it is deeply committed to uprooting abuses in its supply chain, but that this arduous work that will take years to complete: “We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain…Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners… [W]e’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.”
Meanwhile, here is a former Apple executive, telling the truth: “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 half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” The abuses in question include unconscionable safety practices that have led to numerous workplace deaths and injuries."
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