Nightline Airs “Inside an iPad Factory” Expose
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ABC’s Nightline aired their special last night, giving us an insider’s peek into a Foxconn factory in China that produce iPhones and iPads. Granted access to the factory by Apple, it seems that this “unprecedented” look inside the factory was a little less shocking than most were expecting.
The highlights of what we learned, as reported by The Verge:
- It takes 141 steps to make an iPhone, and the devices are essentially all handmade
- It takes five days and 325 hands to make a single iPad
- Foxconn produces 300k iPad camera modules per day
- Foxconn workers pay for their own food — about $.70 per meal, and work 12 hour shifts
- Workers who live in the dorms sleep six to eight a room, and pay $17.50 a month to do so
- Workers make $1.78 an hour
- New employees at Foxconn undergo three days of training and “team building” exercises before they begin
- The FLA (which Apple brought in to audit Foxconn) is interested in whether or not workers will look up at visitors in a factory — if they’ll be “willing to look at curiosities”
- Apple paid $250,000 to join the FLA, and is paying for its audit
- Louis Woo, when asked if he would accept Apple demanding double pay for employees replied “Why not?”
It goes without saying that working conditions in these factories are less than ideal. What should be pointed out is that while there may be thousands of people shown lining up for the jobs inside them, poverty can be highly motivating and forgiving –causing people to work in unreasonable and unfair conditions just to make a little bit of something in an effort to feed and care for their families.
There were sad and disturbing themes touched on for certain, including the cluster of suicides experienced at the factory that “led to the installation of suicide netting to discourage impulsive suicide attempts.” I think the real expose comes from the information that the suicide rate at Foxconn rests below the Chinese national average –something well beyond anything Apple has to do with.
The bright-side of this situation is that for the moment a light has been cast and Apple seems to be doing what they can (or have to) in order to improve things for those workers assembling their products.
