Apple is beginning to reveal more information about its suppliers in China as part of its 2012 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report. Published on Friday, Apple's latest report (which comes in the form of several PDFs) reveals the names of its 156 "leading suppliers" for the first time, and discusses the results of its regular supplier audits—meant to reveal practices like juvenile worker violations, unfair hiring practices, and safety concerns. The company says it conducted more audits than ever before throughout 2011, and the numbers in the report indicate that Apple found fewer major violations than it did in 2010.
Apple says it conducted 229 audits throughout the last year, an 80 percent increase from 2010. When it came to specific core violations, such as underage labor, Apple said it discovered six active and 13 historical cases across five of its facilities, though it "found no instances of intentional hiring of underage labor." Instead, Apple says the facilities in question had "insufficient controls to verify age or detect false documentation."
Compared to the previous year's report, this is down significantly—throughout 2010, Apple found 91 underage workers across 10 facilities. Apple requires its suppliers who are found to have underage workers to send them back to the workers' own choice of school and finance their education through Apple's Child Labor Remediation program. The supplier must also pay the workers the same income that they were earning while they were working at the facility. Apple says it found zero cases of underage labor at any of its final assembly suppliers in 2011.
The report is peppered with data about other violations as well. For example, two facilities were found to have combustible dust incidents that resulted in explosions and several employee deaths, resulting in new requirements for handling these materials. "At the time of this report, all suppliers except one have implemented the counter-measures identified by the team of external experts," Apple wrote. "The one supplier that has not will remain shut down until modifications are in place."
Apple also revealed that it will finally begin allowing an independent auditing team from the Fair Labor Association (FLA) to review its supplier performance and measure it against the FLA's own Workplace Code of Conduct. The FLA is already employed to help monitor other companies that have gone through their own labor concerns, such as Nike. "Most big corporations have their ‘Nike moment’ at some stage — when they realize the difficulties of maintaining their standards, particularly in an increasingly global environment,” FLA President Auret van Heerden told Bloomberg. "The problem with the supply chain is that it’s a moving target."
Finally, Apple announced that it extended its Supplier Employee Education and Development (SEED) program, which began in 2008, to all of its assembly facilities in 2011. The SEED program allows workers to take free classes on English, computer skills, and finance, and the company claims that 60,000 workers have now taken one or more of these classes.
Update: Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly sent out an e-mail to employees with his own thoughts about the supplier report (hat tip MacRumors). "To prevent the use of underage labor, our team interviews workers, checks employment records and audits the age verification systems our suppliers use. These efforts have been very successful and, as a result, cases of underage labor were down sharply from last year," Cook wrote.
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