Designed in California, Assembled in China

There is a now-famous story involving the release of the iPhone in 2007. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs was carrying the prototype in his pocket about one month prior to its release, and discovered that his keys, also in his pocket, were scratching the plastic screen. Known as a stickler for design perfection, Jobs reportedly gathered his fellow executives in a room and told them (angrily), “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”¹ This demand would have implications for a factory complex in China, called Foxconn, where iPhones are assembled. When the order trickled down to a Foxconn foreman, he woke up 8,000 workers in the middle of the night, gave them a biscuit and a cup of tea, and then started them on twelve-hour shifts fitting glass screens into the iPhone frames. Within four days, Foxconn workers were churning out ten thousand iPhones daily.

On its sleek packaging, Apple proudly proclaims that its products are “Designed by Apple in California,” a slogan that evokes beaches, sunshine, and Silicon Valley—where the best and brightest in American engineering ingenuity reside. The products also say, usually in a less visible location, “Assembled in China,” which suggests little, except that the components of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Apple computer were put together in a factory in the world’s most populous country.

It wasn’t until 2012 that most Apple customers learned that China’s Foxconn was the company where their devices are assembled. Investigative reports by the New York Times revealed a company with ongoing problems with labor conditions and worker safety, including fatal explosions and a spate of worker suicides.² (Foxconn responded in part by erecting nets around its buildings to prevent fatal jumps.)

Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., with headquarters in Taiwan) is China’s largest and most prominent private employer with 1.2 million employees—more than any American company except Walmart. Foxconn assembles an incredible 40 percent of the world’s electronics, and earns more revenue than ten of its competitors combined.³ And Foxconn is not just Apple’s favorite place to outsource production; nearly every global electronics company is connected to the manufacturing giant: Amazon (Kindle), Microsoft (Xbox), Sony (PlayStation), Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Motorola, and Toshiba all feed their products to the vast Foxconn factory network.

Behind this manufacturing might is a network of factories now legendary for its enormity. Foxconn’s largest factory compound is in Shenzhen. Dubbed “Factory City,” it employs roughly 300,000 people—all squeezed into one square mile, many of whom live in the dormitories (dorms sleep seven to a room) on the Foxconn campus.⁴ Workers, many of whom come from rural areas in China, often start a shift at 4 A.M. and work until late at night, performing monotonous, routinized work—for example, filing the aluminum shavings from iPad casings six thousand times a day. Thousands of these full-time workers are under the age of eighteen.

Conditions at Foxconn might, in some ways, be better than the conditions in the poverty-stricken small villages from which most of its workers come. But the low pay, long hours, dangerous work conditions, and suicide nets are likely not what the young workers had hoped for when they left their families behind.

In light of the news reports about the problems at Foxconn, Apple joined the Fair Labor Association (FLA), an international nonprofit that monitors labor conditions. The FLA inspected factories and surveyed more than 35,000 Foxconn workers. Their 2012 study verified a range of serious issues. Workers regularly labored more than sixty hours per week, with some employees working more than seven days in a row. Other workers weren’t compensated for overtime. More than 43 percent of the workers reported they had witnessed or experienced an accident, and 64 percent of the employees surveyed said that the compensation does not meet their basic needs. In addition, the FLA found the labor union at Foxconn an unsatisfactory channel for addressing worker concerns, as representatives from the management dominated the union’s membership.⁵

Apple now boasts on its Web site that it is the first technology company to be admitted to the Fair Labor Association. But Apple might not have taken that step had it not been for the New York Times investigative reports and the intense public scrutiny that followed. What is the role of consumers in ensuring that Apple and other companies are ethical and transparent in the treatment of the workers who make our electronic devices?