Apple Judge Guilty

Anip Man Joshi
Sarah Srgo
Writ 102
February 26, 2018 Who is to judge guilty?
Apple started their journey with a vision to bring revolution in technology and with their innovations, bring along a widespread supply chain management with over 150 plus supplier all over the globe. Foxconn is Apple's major contract suppliers in China. A supply chain with such big complexity brings a lot of challenges for the technology giants like corporate social responsibility crisis with numerous accusations of exploitations in its subcontracted factories. With that, Apple has been accused of using China's weak government regulation (Foxconn) for labor exploitation within their factories. Even though these issues with Apple and Foxconn are separate,

After the working conditions were exposed by the media to the general public, the U.S media focused more on this issue, seeking a response from the Apple's executives. Apple performed continuous self-auditing of the company and the results were not promising. Apple pushed its suppliers to bring changes or take the "risk of losing" the business (Lanxon and Cao, 2017). Still the results had no improvement and it was directly pointing towards the fact that Foxconn had been engaged in unethical labor exploitation, Apple said, "While we are unable at this time to fully withdraw from doing business with it, we've made it clear that we will begin looking for other suppliers who better represent Apple's values." (Yaverbaum, 2017). Considering the long-term condition between Foxconn and Apple regarding the labor issues, Apple has started looking for alternatives. This statement from Apple represents the company's strong ethical business attitude against labor exploitation and Apple is brave enough to justify it by cutting off any kinds relation with the

But the media and people are abusing and accusing Apple and its product for the condition at Foxconn's production sites. Apple has been against the abuses all along and has been doing within their capabilities to make their supply chain better. "The issue at hand is that Apple cannot easily extricate itself from Foxconn and ultimately isn't responsible for what Foxconn does, as it's a separate company of which Apple is merely a client" (Yaverbaum, 2017). If similar abuse/problem occurred in overall Apple's supply chain or specific suppliers of Apples (who don't source the production), then it would be ethical to admit that Apple was at fault and, Apple would have to suffer a major production and operation problem. And until and unless the problem goes beyond Foxconn, it would not be ethical to blame Apple for all the problems at