Apple COO Jeff Williams says company takes heat on child labor because it goes out looking for it

Source: 9to5mac.com --- Thursday, January 07, 2016
In a radio interview on the syndicated show Conversations on Health Care , Apple COO Jeff Williams said that the reason Apple has come under attack for the use of child labor in its supply chain is that the company actively goes out looking for it. Other companies, he said, simply keep their heads down. No company wants to talk about child labor. They don’t want to be associated with that. We shine a light on it. We go out and search for cases where an underage worker is found in a factory somewhere and then we take drastic actions with the supplier and the labor groups to try and make a change. Then we report it publicly every year . We take a lot of heat for that. But we think the only way to make change is to go hit it head-on and talk about it. Apple has come under fire over the years when underage workers were found in the company’s supply chain, and Williams has spoken before about Apple’s unusual stance on these issues … Back in 2014 , when a Panorama documentary found that child labor was used in Indonesian tin mines, whose output feeds into the Apple supply chain, Williams said that it was more moral to work for change than simply to walk away. Apple has two choices: We could make sure all of our suppliers buy tin from smelters outside of Indonesia, which would probably be the easiest thing for us to do and would certainly shield us from criticism. But it would be the lazy and cowardly path, because it would do nothing t ...

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