Throughout the world, many companies run businesses that go against the law. For many years, those companies seem to get away with bad business practices without a care in the world. It is only until those bad practices are pointed out to the general public do the companies change. Right now, Apple Inc. is in the process of changing the work ethics at their factories under Foxconn in China (Foxconn Audit).
After recent audits on Foxconn, due to reports of poor working conditions and a large amount of suicides, they started to change the way they treat their employees in China. Apple has lowered the amount of hours employees work while increasing their wages to compensate for the hours lost. Apple and Foxconn are working on improving the fairness to their employees in order to meet labor laws in China.
My question is, if the auditors never found anything wrong with Foxconn, would Apple and Foxconn have changed the way they treat their workers? I think they wouldn't have changed anything about the way they operate. As of now, the changes they will have to make to improve the labor treatment will have huge impacts on their net income! Apple will either have to suffer a lower profit margin or they will have to increase the cost of their products which will decrease the amount of products sold. Either way, their net income will go down.
I feel that the companies are only making changes because they feel like if they don't, they will come under huge criticism. If Apple really cared about the unfairness to their employees, they would have been looking into it long ago and fixing the problem. Instead they wait until someone shines light onto it to address the problem. If people didn't care about the situation even with it in the news, then I doubt Apple would make any changes at all.
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