Guilt and the iPhone

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

AS THE iPhone 6S and 6S+ are released to the public, some are looking back at the controversy created by Mike Daisey in 2012 with his monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”.

Daisey described the working conditions in the factories that make electronics for Apple and other western companies and sparked an investigation into the whole supply chain used by Apple.

Even if later on the factual accuracy of some of this monologue has since been questioned, Apple launched a yearly “supplier responsibility report” in which they champion all their efforts to make sure they don’t slip up.

But as a BBC production team headed by Richard Bilton discovered this year, all is not guilt-free with your new iPhone.

Travelling not only to the factories in China, but also as far afield as the Indonesian tin mines supplying the building blocks of all electronics, Bilton finds out what the situation is really like on the ground.

Although there are many reports on the conditions of workers, in this particular film the cameramen become workers themselves and go undercover to reveal the truth of life at Apple’s largest supplier — Foxconn.

In this year’s report Apple claims “we work in our supplier’s facilities, day in and day out, to make sure they understand our code of conduct”.

But as you will see in one particularly shocking scene of the BBC piece, named: Apple’s Broken Promises, safety lessons are given en masse, with answers provided and training times falsified. The code of conduct is followed only in name, it seems.

In Indonesia the images of slag heaps and child labourers toiling in the mud for pennies is unpleasant to say the least. While these problems are not restricted to Apple, it is a company that strives to be seen to be above the rest, and so we can expect more.

Is it too much to ask that it lives up to its word and delivers on the promises it has made?