Friday, 19 December 2014

CHILD ABUSE: Apple's iPhone Suppliers Use Children To Dig In Lethally Dangerous Mud Pits For Tin Ore - BBC Claims

Apple mud pit
The BBC's "Panorama" show has aired a brutal documentary about Apple that makes two main claims:
  1. That Apple sources the tin for its iPhones from mud pits in Indonesia where children work, risking frequent mudslides that frequently claim lives.
  2. That work inside its Chinese iPhone factories is so grueling that workers fall asleep on the factory line.
Apple told the BBC it would investigate the claims.
The BBC sent three teams of undercover workers into various Chinese factories and raw-materials suppliers to get its video footage. It's not clear which specific factories the BBC entered.
Ralph Nader is quoted in the documentary as saying "the conditions of work are totally physically intolerable."
Fourteen workers killed themselves at Apple's Foxconn factory, the BBC reports.

We asked Apple for comment. We'll update this post when we hear back.
Apple factoryBBCA worker at her post in a Chinese iPhone factory in BBC footage.
The documentary covers a lot of news that has previously been aired about Apple's factories — video and footage have aired from inside the Pegatron and Foxconn factories before. China Labour Watch, a workers rights organization, is one of the sources in the report. CLW is a longtime critic of work at Apple's outsourced factories.
But the BBC has gone a step further by following the Apple parts supply chain back to the source, where the BBC found children digging for tin in mud pits in Bangka, Indonesia. The workers are at constant risk of being buried in landslides as the walls of the makeshift opencast mines are hosed to sheath off more mud and expose more tin ore for iPhone parts.
The program also showed dredgers raking up the sand and coral from the seabed in Indonesia to get tin, churning the formally pristine ocean and coral reefs into a sea of mud. The coral doesn't grow back, a marine scientist on the show says.

-bbc

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