Apple Issues 2014 Supplier Progress Reports–Details

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Apple Supplier Responsibility
2014 Progress Report
Apple is deeply committed to expanding opportunities for the people who make
our products and ensuring these workers are treated with respect and dignity.
We will continue to work closely with our suppliers and stakeholders to provide
fair and safe workplaces and protect the environment wherever Apple products
are manufactured.
Highlights from Our 2014 Report
We launched the Apple Supplier Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) Academy,
an 18-month curriculum aimed at raising the level of EHS expertise in our supply
chain. In 2013, over 240 factory personnel
representing more than 270,000
workers
enrolled in this program.
We started a project to drive accountability for the vocational schools that place
student interns in our supplier facilities.
We drove our suppliers to achieve an average of 95 percent compliance with our
standard maximum 60-hour workweek. We tracked more than 1 million workers
weekly in this program.
We confirmed in January 2014 that all active, identified tantalum smelters in our
supply chain were verified as conflict-free by third-party auditors.
We released a list of the smelters and refiners whose tin, tantalum, tungsten, and
gold we use so it’s clear which ones have been verified as conflict-free and which
ones still need independent verification.
We launched a pilot of our Clean Water Program with 13 supplier sites
who
collectively use more than 41 million cubic meters of water per year
with a
goal to reuse a significant amount of treated process wastewater and recycle
water within the production process.
We continued to seek out abuses of migrant workers by conducting 33 audits
specific to this topic, including 16 factories not previously audited. We required
suppliers to reimburse these foreign contract workers US$3.9 million in excessive
fees paid to labor brokers, bringing our total reimbursements since 2008 to
US$16.9 million.
We have driven our suppliers to train more than 3.8 million workers on their
rights since 2008
including over 1.5 million in 2013 alone.
We conducted 451 audits at all levels of our supply chain
a 51 percent increase
from 298 audits in 2012
in facilities where nearly 1.5 million workers make
Apple products.
We strengthened our Supplier Code of Conduct and publicly released our Supplier
Responsibility Standards
a document with more than 100 pages outlining
Apple’s detailed expectations on labor and human rights, ethics, health and safety,
and environment.

 

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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