How Many People Died To Make Your iPad?

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“iPhone demand helps Apple achieve record profit” read one headline about the $13.1 billion the company made in the last quarter. The iPhone 4s went on sale in the weeks following co-founder Steve Jobs’s death; Apple has now sold a record 37 million iPhones, up from the previous record, 20.34 million.

But Apple is able to churn out so many shiny products, and at a price that consumers are happy to pay, thanks to 700,000 people in Asia, Europe and elsewhere. None of these people are Apple employees: As the New York Times recently reported, Apple itself employs far fewer people, 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas. While Jobs boasted in the 1980s that the Macintosh was “a machine that is made in America,” and iMacs were made in an Elk Grove, California factory in 2002, Apple has now turned — like other tech companies — to foreign manufacturing under the guidance of Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s operations expert who became chief executive last August, six weeks before Jobs died.

Foreign manufacturers, and especially those in China, have a skilled workforce that works round the clock, lives in dormitories (sometimes 20 people in one apartment) far from their families and works 12-hour shifts six days a week in perilous conditions and without the workers’ protections people in the US would demand and rightfully. Foxconn Technology, which is one of China’s biggest employers and has 1.2 million workers, can call up 3,000 people in the middle of the night to churn out iPhones, iPads and iPods. If someone in Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, makes a last-minute change to an iPhone design, Foxconn can have its workers make that change and produce over 10,000 iPhones in 96 hours.

Foxconn’s workers also assemble an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics; its customers include Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung. The company has come under scrutiny, and Apple too, in the wake of worker deaths and injuries at an iPad plant an Chengdu in May of 2011. The New York Times has a lengthy report about the conditions in the factories and workers’ housing, including an interview with Li Mingqi, who used to manage the factory where the explosion occurred and was fired after seven years with Foxconn when he objected to being relocated.

Lai Xiaodong, an employee who died, suffered burns over 90 percent of his body. He was in charge of a team that oversaw the machines that polish iPad cases. In the weeks after the iPad went on sale, workers were told they had to polish thousands of iPads a day and the plant was filled with aluminum dust. Three others were killed and 18 injured. Seven months later, another explosion due to aluminum dust occurred at a Shanghai plant that also made iPads. 59 workers were injured, 23 of whom had to be hospitalized.

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Photo by coolmikeol

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
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Amber B.

8:03PM PST on Feb 25, 2012

one more reason to hate technology and to NEVER want an Apple product of any kind.

send a green star

Debbie C.

6:46AM PST on Feb 15, 2012

I have no desire to ever own a IPhone after reading this.

Debbie L.

2:41PM PST on Feb 6, 2012

It's good to know. Thanks for the article.

s. r.

12:16AM PST on Feb 2, 2012

foxconn is SICK. i no buy.

Christine S.

7:19PM PST on Jan 30, 2012

The abuse of workers is one reason I won't buy a new fancy phone. The other reason is the habitat destruction and poaching of wildlife during the mining of the minerals for the phone's batteries.

Latonya W.

11:01AM PST on Jan 30, 2012

DOnt have one and Im glad............this is sad.........

Joe R.

2:02PM PST on Jan 29, 2012

Eye-opening. Thanks.

KS G.

4:06AM PST on Jan 29, 2012

Thanks for the article.

Vetch H.

2:52AM PST on Jan 29, 2012

I don't even have a mobile.

Zuzana K.

2:41AM PST on Jan 29, 2012

Thank you for the article. Indeed in university Political Economy course this was the first case study we learned about to it is good that now there is wider awareness of it. Foxconn was the company we learned of, where it is so bad that they apparently installed 'anti-suicide nets' on windows(!) I have never found Apple appealing and upon learning this I find it repugnant.