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Apple Announcement 2012

January 19, 2012 by · Comments Off on Apple Announcement 2012 

Apple Announcement 2012Apple Announcement 2012, Released alongside a separate list of suppliers and an announcement of new membership in the Fair Labor Association, Apple’s latest report describes significant progress. But the company’s “black box” policy remains in force.

The China Digital Times writes that Apple’s latest Supplier Responsibility Progress Report shows an 80% drop in underage labor and “signs of a new and long-awaited transparency.” The company also separately published a nearly comprehensive list of suppliers for the first time, and announced its membership in the Fair Labor Association to provide some measure of third-party oversight. “But this relative openness still leaves much about Apple’s supply chain obscured.”

Apple’s report describes 229 audits throughout its supply chain – an 80 percent increase over 2010 – including more than 100 first-time audits. “We uncovered some violations and worked with our suppliers to correct the issues,” says the report. “We will expand our environmental auditing program in the coming year.”

Apple also announced its membership in the Fair Labor Association, a factory monitoring organization established in 1999 by the Clinton White House and a group of apparel manufacturers following a string of highly-publicized sweatshop scandals.

Apple’s report emerged amid a burst of well-deserved attention to Mike Daisey’s show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” which was featured this month in National Public Radio’s “This American Life” episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.”

The Times further describes attributes and criticism of Apple’s reports and position, including the observation that the company continues to refuse to name the suppliers it has audited and to disclose the audit results by supplier: “Apple’s Supplier Responsibility Progress Report would be a lot more helpful and meaningful if it went one or two steps further and broke the report down into individual countries and showed to what extent the individual suppliers in those countries complied with the law as well as Apple’s own standards.”

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