Apple’s new supplier responsibility report, issued last week in advance of its shareholder meeting, is now being used to attack the company for auditing its foreign suppliers’ labor practices and acting to stop worker exploitation. The report, which describes the company’s efforts to police a “Supplier Code of Conduct” on the companies it contracts with, those companies’ own chain of suppliers, and the foreign worker agencies they use, outlined a number of problems Apple discovered in auditing its overseas suppliers.
Included in the report were details pertaining to the discovery of the illegal employment of children and abusive hiring practices that impose horrific fees upon foreign workers employed at factories which essentially reduce them to being indentured servants. Writing for the Telegraph UK, Malcolm Moore characterized the report’s findings to make it sound like Apple had been caught violating the law and had been forced to admit that it was “using child labor in China,” when in fact the opposite was actually the case.