We all question you because you come across like an apple fanboy.
There’s enough evidence out there that Apple’s violated child labor laws through their OEMs for reasonable people to disagree with you, despite the arrogance of your assertions that only your sources are valid, and others aren’t.
I’ve owned and used Apple products since my college days in the 80’s. I’ve had Apple as a client. I have family who works for them. I know people in China who do business with them.
For me, there’s enough evidence that they do not do business ethically. It took a 25 year old recording artist to call them out on royalty violations. Good thing she’s the 900 lbs gorilla of the music biz, or they’d have ignored her, as they are wont to do.
Jobs was a repugnant person as a boss - a sociopath actually. To be fair, many successful CEO’s are sociopathic in many respects because there are times when your people have to come dead last in order to save your company. I get that.
However, there’s enough smoke from Apple’s camp to satisfy me that they are - singly and as a group - people I don’t with whom I don’t want to do business.
I have no trouble reading, and you protest too much with respect to Apple, their reputation, and how they conduct their affairs.
Did you bother to look at the list of companies contracting with FoxConn? Apparently you just ignore that all those other companies who do business with the SAME contractors but you only DAMN Apple for the bad labor conditions, the ones that are actually associated with other manufacturers, and DOCUMENTED to be so associated in the very news articles attributed to Apple every time. . . and yet Apple is the ONLY company who is actually doing anything about those conditions. You are a hypocrite.
There’s enough evidence out there that Apple’s violated child labor laws through their OEMs for reasonable people to disagree with you, despite the arrogance of your assertions that only your sources are valid, and others aren’t.
There is? Where? Audits by qualified international labor organizations have been performed and they cannot find any deliberate conspiracies to employ children at these factories in violation of Chinese Labor Laws. Have they found underage workers? Yes. . . and in almost every case it was the CHILDREN who had violated the law by forging or borrowing documents to be able to get hired.
WOW! You don't believe audited studies done by respected independent agencies who found a total of 349 underage workers in 11 countries in seven years and prefer to believe rumors from an agenda driven left wing organization? I showed you the SEVERE economic PENALTIES that accrue to a contractor being found hiring underage workers or not meeting Apple's stringent standards. . . yet you STILL maintain they accept these bad actions.
Apple actively seeks out violations of its labor standards, unlike the other companies who contract with these assembly contractors. . . and takes action when it finds violations. Yet YOU call Apple unethical!?!?! All of those other contractees join organizations so they can say they care, but don't do diddly-squat, except put out press releases about how bad things are. These are facts, not your feel good twaddle, Rina.
This is more than just the fact that Apple's contractors MUST pay for the education through age 25 of any under age worker found, which is a huge disincentive for any employer to hire anyone under age. IT simply does not pay for them to hire anyone under age and them be on the hook for another eight years of pay plus tuition for their education merely to save a few bucks. If you believe that they ignore those extremely high risks and go ahead and deliberately seek out underage workers, you are really delusional.
Apple has historically CANCELLED contracts worth BILLIONS of dollars with contractors who did not meet these standards. . . and it cost APPLE money because they took that work to another contractor that cost them more! No company is going to risk that kind of money, again for a few bucks in savings.
Are you that deluded you ignore the historical record???? Apparently you are.
Those penalties are reasons why the audits only found 349 underage workers among 1.5 million workers in Apple's supply chain. It simply is not worth it to hire them. Use your common sense that God gave you. The management of these businesses are simply NOT that stupid to risk losing their contracts or incurring the costs associated with hiring underage workers.
Apple's Contracts on the Apple Music service, which I have read, and you obviously have not, did indeed compensate the independents for the use of the music during the trial period. The conflict was just over WHEN they were going to be paid. Apple even gave the a higher percentage to compensate them for not being paid during that period. I also understood WHY they were not going to be paid during that period, reasons that had to do with the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, (GAAP), which require that such payments be made from the revenues from which they are earned, which again, you obviously don't have a clue about. There were no "royalty violations" just a disagreement about when the royalties would be paid.
We are talking about a few hundred thousand to a couple million dollars here. It was not big bucks for anyone, but especially for Apple. It was all about accounting rules and and the bean counters, and when people were going to be paid.
Again, your anecdotal stories are not the equivalent of data. . . and that's all they are, anecdotes. I provided data. . . and links to that data from qualified sources. NOT from left wing agenda driven organizations that were not what you claimed, "based in China".
If you don't like them, your solution is simple. Don't do business with them. . . but then to be honestly consistent on the labor issues you have to stop doing business with every single other business on that list that does business in China as well.
Will you? I sincerely doubt it. The suicides occurred at a plant working for Microsoft, Sony, Nokia, and HP. . . not Apple. The mass suicide threats occurred at a plant making products for Microsoft, Asus, and HP, not Apple. Are you dropping them from your product lists?
There was only ONE SINGLE suicide associated with Apple products and it occurred two years before the spate of suicides and involved a mid-level engineer at FoxConn who was questioned by Chinese Police for the theft of an iPhone prototype. After being released by the police and told to be available for further questioning, he went home to his apartment in the city, not a dormitory, and jumped from his fifth floor (IIRC) balcony. That is it.
Exactly what are the unethical business practices you claim occur? There are a lot more I can point to from the Microsoft side. . . friends of mine who had their copyright IP stolen by Microsoft, and then bankrupted by the lawsuits. Those are unethical business practices. As far as I can see, Apple has always tried to license any IP it uses, not steal it.
I have lived a lot longer than you and I have been a CEO. . . I think I know a lot more about how the world works than do you. My college days were twenty years before yours. I too have known people who worked at Apple and people in China who do business with them . . . and have become rich because of it. . . and also some who have become NOT POOR because of it.