The New York Times offers a fascinating, in-depth follow-up to the workers’ rights violations reported over the past three years at Chinese factories of Taiwanese based global electronics supplier Foxconn, which assembles many popular gadgets sold in the West, including Apple’s iPad and iPhone.
The report looks at how working conditions at Foxconn’s Chinese factories have improved — and they have, albeit slowly, with improvements such as better chairs, safety foam on stairwells, and a pledge to increase wages again — following an audit of the company commissioned by Apple and completed in March by the Fair Labor Association, a global trade organization dedicated to finding solutions to labor issues.
As the report by the Times concludes: “Changing the company’s culture is slow going. But the needed reforms, executives at Apple and Foxconn hope and believe, are falling into place.”
(H/T: Matt Buchanan, Buzzfeed FWD)
