Inside Apple’s iPhone Factory In China — Transcript

An inside look at Apple's iPhone factory in China reveals labor issues, factory conditions, and the role of Foxconn in manufacturing.

Key Takeaways

Apple relies heavily on Foxconn for iPhone production, with massive scale and workforce.
Labor conditions are monotonous and demanding, with limited worker freedom during peak times.
Child labor and forced labor allegations have tainted Apple's supply chain reputation.
Automation is increasing but human labor remains central to production.
Apple faces ongoing challenges balancing profit motives with ethical labor practices.

Summary

Apple subcontracted iPhone manufacturing to Foxconn, the largest employer in China with over 1.3 million workers.
The Zhengzhou Foxconn plant, known as iPhone City, employs up to 350,000 workers during peak production, assembling up to 500,000 iPhones daily.
Workers perform highly repetitive tasks, often under mandatory overtime conditions, with dormitory living conditions that are crowded and basic.
Undercover investigations reveal no extreme abuses at Zhengzhou but highlight boredom, high turnover, and restricted resignations during peak times.
Apple has faced allegations of child labor and forced Uyghur labor in its supply chain, though not directly linked to the Zhengzhou plant.
The Chinese government supports recruitment efforts to maintain factory staffing, sometimes setting quotas for local areas.
Foxconn is gradually introducing automation with robots (Foxbots) replacing some assembly line tasks.
Apple has been criticized for prioritizing profits over labor rights, continuing relationships with suppliers despite violations.
Future labor costs may push Apple to relocate factories, while labor practices remain under scrutiny.
The video questions whether Apple can align its manufacturing practices with its brand values and social responsibility.

Chapters

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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Last month, it emerged that Apple, the most valuable company in the world and supposedly an icon of squeaky clean progressive values, brushed aside allegations of child labor within its key Chinese supply chain. The suggestion is that a big Apple supplier named Suyun

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Electronics employed workers as young as 14 in the interest of keeping up with the ferocious appetite for Apple goods in the West. Apple chided Suyun, but maintained ties for months and even years afterwards. With new allegations like this and a spate of suicides

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associated with the brand's manufacturing base over the years, we thought it was time we put on our lanyards and take a peek inside an iPhone factory in China. The first and most important thing to understand is that Apple factories in China aren't

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technically Apple factories at all. Instead, the California tech giant subcontracts its manufacturing out to a firm called Han High Precision Industry Co. Limited, which is much more popularly known as Foxconn Technology Group, or simply Foxconn. Foxconn was founded by colorful Taiwanese

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businessman Terry Gou, who has been playfully dubbed the Donald Trump of Taiwan and is reportedly worth somewhere north of 5 billion US. Foxconn is the biggest employer in China with some 1.3 million members of staff on the books in

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2018. It manufactures consumer electronics for a variety of companies from Samsung to Dell to HP, but is most famous for manufacturing Apple products and most notably the iPhone. Fully half of all the world's iPhones, many hundreds of millions, are manufactured

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at a sprawling Foxconn facility on the outskirts of Zhengzhou. Zhengzhou is a city of around 9 and a half million people in Henan Province, historically a poverty-stricken province of the People's Republic. Locals often refer to the Zhengzhou Foxconn plant as iPhone City,

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and that's a pretty fair description. At peak times, some 350,000 staff work there, most living in dormitories on site. During the buildup to a big new iPhone release, the plant can produce as many as half a million units a day.

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That's nearly 350 every minute. Around the factory, supporting businesses such as restaurants, massage parlors, and shoe shops have sprung up to support the mammoth workforce. Inside the factory, which is dedicated to the final stage of iPhone assembly, some 400 discrete tasks

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are broken down and carried out by its army of workers. Most employees will perform one task repeatedly over and over again, day after day. This could be as interesting as soldering or as dull as fitting a single screw into the back

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of the devices again and again and again. So, how do they recruit? Back in 2017, a student at NYU called Dejian Zen went undercover for 6 months at the plant to investigate the labor situation. According to Zen's report,

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all he had to do to get hired was join a queue of eager applicants outside the factory. Zen was asked for his identification and required to recite the English alphabet as it was in common use in the factory. Then he was in. Zen

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worked on an assembly line with around 200 other recruits, monotonously assembling many hundreds of devices per shift. He said the work was boring and tiring, but didn't report any specific abuses across the grueling 6-day week, aside from a supervisor yelling every

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now and then. His main complaint was that the overtime was presented as voluntary, but was very clearly mandatory on pain of being fired. It's been reported elsewhere that the Chinese government itself, keen to keep this lucrative business running smoothly,

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steps in to help with a never-ending recruitment drive. During peak summer months, in the buildup to the traditional autumn iPhone release date, a speaker is said to stand at the Zhengzhou factory gates, yelling out for workers who are optimistic and diligent. Henan

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province even reportedly sets quotas for the numbers of workers that villages and cities should provide to keep the factory ticking over efficiently and effectively. The gender balance on the factory floor is said to be roughly equal. And the typical age of a factory

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worker is between 18 and 25, though interns are frequently as young as 16. And while underage workers have been found in Apple's supply chain, nearly a dozen 15-year-old children were discovered to be working across three factories according to one report, there

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are no reports that Foxconn's Zhengzhou facility was directly involved. Worker conditions in Zhengzhou, while not as brutal as sweatshops, do seem extraordinary to Western eyes. Factory workers stay close by the plant in dorm buildings up to 12 stories high with

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eight workers sharing a room, sometimes with only one bathroom per floor shared by as many as 200 people. US-based pressure group China Labor Watch discovered during undercover investigations that workers are actively forbidden from resigning their post during busy peak times, but conceded

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that the most egregious allegations of brutality and bullying made by others have perhaps been overstated. One worker whose role was wiping special polish onto the LCD screens said she handled around 1,700 iPhones a day and that it was mundane work, but also that there

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were worse things to endure in life than monotony. However, the grind of working six straight days only seeing family on Sunday if they happen to live locally clearly takes its toll. The most common complaint about working at Foxconn in

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Zhengzhou is boredom. When NY student Zen spent those six weeks on the production line, he said he quickly grew to hate it. Real workers speaking anonymously have claimed a high turnover of staff. After a year, people get bored

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or disinterested, claimed one. When that happens, they leave. Other Foxconn workers have said that while building iPhones isn't exactly their childhood dream, the facility is no better or worse than other Chinese factories they'd worked at. Of course, there is a

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much darker side to the allegations leveled at Apple. Although not directly related to the assembly plant in Zhengzhou, it has been reported that Apple products have been made using forced Uyghur labor, an ethnic minority in China who endure horrific working conditions and

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even wage theft by unscrupulous overseers. According to the New York Times, lawmakers in the United States have proposed legislation designed to curb American companies' ability to use forced Uyghur labor. Apple, it is said, set out to weaken the bill. Although

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Apple, for its part, says it did not lobby against the legislation, but instead had, as the company puts it, constructive discussions with the relevant congressional staff. And as for those MacBook makers at Suyun Electronics we mentioned at the start,

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when the issue came to light, Apple told the firm to address the issue or risk losing business. But Apple otherwise continued to work with Suyun for 3 years. Former members of the so-called supplier responsibility team at Apple

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told reporters from The Information that the Suyun incident wasn't isolated and that profits sadly seem to have been the driving force behind decision-making. So what does the future look like for Apple and its labor practices? As living standards in China inevitably improve,

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so does the cost of labor, and so the factories may well move elsewhere. Foxconn recently found itself in hot water for exaggerating its staffing requirements to Apple in order to illicitly cream profits from the Californian firm. So, it's not always a

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cozy relationship between the two giants. Most pertinently, undercover student Zen observed in 2017 that several stations on the production line where he worked were already taken up by robots, known in-house as Foxbots, a trend that will surely continue.

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However, its iPhones are manufactured going forward into the future. Let's just hope Apple's working practices live up to the firm's lofty brand ideals and that latter-day disciples of Steve Jobs can at least help someone somewhere get a good job. What do you think? Is Apple

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justified keeping suppliers at arm's length in order to k

Topics:AppleiPhoneFoxconnChina factorylabor conditionschild laborforced laborsupply chainmanufacturingautomation

Frequently Asked Questions

Who manufactures Apple's iPhones in China?

Apple subcontracts its iPhone manufacturing to Foxconn Technology Group, which operates the large Zhengzhou plant known as iPhone City.

What are the working conditions like at the Foxconn Zhengzhou factory?

Workers perform repetitive tasks in a highly regimented environment, often working six days a week with mandatory overtime, living in crowded dormitories with limited facilities.

Has Apple been linked to child labor or forced labor in its supply chain?

Apple has faced allegations of child labor at suppliers like Suyun Electronics and forced Uyghur labor in other parts of its supply chain, though not directly at the Zhengzhou Foxconn plant.

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