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Tim Cook led off his appearance at a Goldman Sachs conference today with a stirring defense of his company’s efforts to curb unsafe and unfair labor conditions in its supply chain. According to Cook, Apple’s not just good at keeping its suppliers in line; it’s the best. But is “better” good enough?
Cook’s comments came during a long rundown of the efforts Apple has made along these lines; educating workers, ensuring safe conditions, deterring underage labor. He’s pretty proud of the company’s record:
“I would tell you that no one in our industry is doing more to improve working conditions than Apple. We are constantly audition facilities, going deep into the supply chain, looking for problems, finding problems, and fixing problems. And we report everything, because we believe that transparency is so very important in this area.”
And to be honest, that’s very probably true, although not necessarily because Apple’s the most altruistic OEM in the land. It does, though, have the highest profile, and Foxconn—one of its most prominent suppliers—has had a seemingly disproportionate number of recent tragedies.
“We know that people have a very high expectation of Apple,” said Cook. “We have an even higher expectation of ourselves.” And that’s basically the question: Does Apple lead because it took a step forward or because it was pushed into the limelight? And can it effect change not only for its own workers, but inspire other companies to follow suit?
We’ll see. We’ll hope.
Apple does lead the way, I can’t recall any announcements from other companies regarding the issue. For some people Apple can never do enough, let’s hope things do improve further as Apple step up efforts further and that others such as HP and Dell follow..
Wow Taf, your level of Apple support is reaching new heights every day. I doff my cap to such unquestioning support and brand loyalty.
“I can’t recall any announcements from other companies regarding the issue.”
Maybe they don’t feel the need to shout about it and try to gain capital from it. Or, maybe they do announce it but the world’s media don’t give a shit, spending too much time publishing article after article after article about every possible piece of Apple news.
Case in point: my newspaper a few weeks ago contained no less than three separate stories and a further mention in a fourth story about a man no-one has heard of being appointed to run Apple’s shops, but precisely zero stories or mentions that Sir Howard Stringer, Chief Executive of Sony, had stepped aside in favour of the man who runs their PlayStation and TV divisions.
The thing is when you reach the top, everyone watches you, make a right move or a wrong move, people know about it, some will want you to fail, others succeed.
For example: I ‘ve watched Man United over the years, since they are the biggest footy team, they get the most publicity, more live game coverage etc… Also people who support rival teams want them to fail.
The same can be said about apple. At the top now, some google fandroids would refer apple to fail.
Agreed. And thanks for proving my point: on such subjects as this you know what the media tells you, not what is true.