Dear Mr Cook, I am one of the millions of people who use an iPhone every day. I often use it to reply to urgent e-mails I receive from China Labour Watch's investigators about the status of their investigation of Apple's supplier factories in China. I also use my iPhone to answer questions from journalists about the working conditions in those factories. As a labour activist who has spent over a decade fighting against sweatshops, buying an iPhone was not an easy decision for me.
Although the international anti-sweatshop movement has recently trained its focus on Apple's supply chain, I find that the labour conditions in Apple's supplier factories are actually not the worst of the factories used by multinational electronics companies there.
However, this is what 'not the worst' means for workers who make your products:
They work as long as 11 hours a day, six days a week, with only one hour-long break during lunch. For this, they only make about 2,000 yuan (HK$2,500) a month.
Those who work in the iPad case polishing workshops are exposed to vast amounts of aluminium dust and may be injured or even killed in an explosion should the dust ignite. This has happened twice in the past year. First, in May at a Foxconn plant in Chengdu (three killed, 15 injured) and then in December at a Ri-Teng plant in Shanghai (61 injured).
At the factories of Foxconn, one of your largest suppliers, 13 workers committed suicide in 2010. Foxconn's response of putting up nets on factory buildings to catch suicidal jumpers indicates that it believes this is an ongoing concern, since many of the factors that may have led to the workers taking their lives - including long working hours and social isolation - remain unchanged.
