Four Corners: Mar 2
Four Corners looks at Apple Corporation’s dubious work practices and putting lives at risk.
- Published by David Knox
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Monday’s Four Corners presents the BBC Panorama film Apple’s Broken Promises looking at Apple Corporation’s dubious work practices and putting lives at risk.
Apple is the most valuable brand on the planet, making products that consumers love to buy. But how does this company treat its workers, when the world isn’t looking?
The BBC’s Panorama program goes undercover inside the factory in China that makes the big-selling Apple iPhone 6. There we see the price paid by Chinese workers on the production line.
Apple has made a series of promises that are supposed to protect the workers in factories that supply products for the company. Those promises are comprehensive and involve guarantees about working conditions, even detailing minimum standards of accommodation for workers who have travelled hundreds of miles to work in these factories.
Under-cover cameras, though, show a very different picture. Employees are treated like they are prisoners. They are threatened and forced to sign work sheets that show them agreeing to long hours of overtime. Many fall asleep at the end of long shifts, making the work environment dangerous for themselves and others.
But it isn’t just the factories that turn out the products that create questionable conditions for health and safety.
Reporter Richard Bilton goes to Indonesia to see the abysmal conditions of miners and their children working to gather tin used in electronic products. Landslides in the open cut mines are frequent and often lethal. Apple says it doesn’t knowingly buy tin from illegal miners, but the people who make their living mining and smelting tin tell a quite different story.
Is this powerful company making billions of dollars each year really doing all it can to protect the people who make its products and the materials that go into them? Or is their promise of being a good global corporate citizen a sham?
Monday 2 March, 8.30pm ABC.
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5 Responses
Hmmm this report has already been debunked after it was shown, how can the ABC now show it when it has already been proven not correct?
The ABC have bought the program. If needs be, it can be shown with a disclaimer.
IMO Apple have been singled out because of their morally bankrupt tax avoidance schemes. Apple isn’t the only Multinational who enjoys the Irish-Double-Dutch sandwich.
Apple’s crown is under threat, will Xiaomi face the same scrutiny?
The report has not been debunked. Apple released a statement defending it’s position but did not claim that events depicted in this report (backed up by video footage) did not happen or were not still occurring in some parts of their supply chain.
The report doesn’t present Apple’s side of the story so you could argue that it’s not the whole story or that it is unbalanced.
You have to think that something is amiss when Apple sends its Chief Operating Officer to China to get one of its contractors to install nets around its factory and dormitory buildings to catch people who decide to jump out of the window.
I thought 4Corners was above this?
Maybe they just want to bash Apple, it seams to be a national pass time. All the tech companies use cheap labor other wise we’d be paying much more for our high tech devices. As for taxes they are not doing anything that is illegal and if you worked for them as an accountant and didn’t minimize the taxes you wouldn’t be working in the company very long.
I would like this company to pay its fair share of aussie tax, the sales they get from this country and the miniscule proportion of tax they pay is disgusting. Yeah yeah its all “legal” etc blah blah blah, but morally it is wrong. I am not suprised by this doco, many large companies play ther same sort of game. They say all the right stuff with their nicey nicey PR, but still do what the hell they want. They should be held accountable for every step of their supply chain, especially when you consider how much they charge for their overpriced products. Message to apple and all the others….lower your profits and treat your workers better….