I Refuse to Buy or Cover Another Apple Product

It’s time for a tech labor reckoning

Photo by Nikolai Chernichenko on Unsplash

Apple had a terrible revelation come out at the end of 2020, but thanks to other pressing news like the slow rolling chaos of the pandemic and the recent failed US insurrection, I’m worried that it went unnoticed by too many.

Right at the end of December, the online premium business publication The Information released a report showing that Apple knowingly relied on child labor for three years from one of their MacBook suppliers (roughly 2013–2016) without doing anything meaningful about it. Business Insider shared some additional details mixed in with their own reporting and were unable to obtain any comment from Apple executives.

This is far from the first time Apple has been in the spotlight for supporting illegal or unethical labor practices. A month prior, in November of 2020, they cut ties with their second largest iPhone supplier due to rule violations in that company’s “student worker program,” which turned out to be a nice name for an exploitative trick. Essentially, young students were building iPhones under the guise of internships that would tie into their degrees, but it turned out many of them weren’t studying anything remotely related.

They’ve also faced recent criticism from the Washington Post for relying on supply companies that might be using forced labor from Uyghur people imprisoned by the Chinese government, which is also terrible.

Apple has had labor problems for a while, but they usually don’t wait three years to fix them. Google search screen capture by the author.

If you do a quick Google search, you’ll see numerous incidents and allegations about problematic labor issues with Apple or Apple suppliers stretching back over a decade. What makes this newest story different and more insidious is the extreme level and duration of intentional neglect. Apple likes to pride themselves on a progressive image, and proudly touts their complex policies that are supposed to prevent situations like this in the first place with beautiful words on a whole host of fancy public-facing web sites. They have no excuse for waiting three years to do anything in this newly revealed scenario. The only apparent motivation was profit over human dignity…