To truly honor Martin Luther King Jr , Apple should stop exploiting laborers
0To truly honor Martin Luther King Jr., Apple should stop exploiting laborers.
Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, celebrating the inspirational leader who died fighting to bring racial equality to the United States. Since 2015, Apple has commemorated this holiday by replacing its homepage with an MLK photo and quote or reflection. This year’s quote — “the time is always right to do what is right” — is especially noteworthy, as Apple CEO Tim Cook evoked the same phrase in November 2013 when discussing Apple’s social responsibilities as a business.
On this day, it’s tempting to focus on Apple’s broad issues with race. Despite appointing a vice president of diversity and inclusion to improve representation in its executive and non-executive ranks, Apple’s employee diversity hasn’t been improving much, and the company lost both its diversity czar and one of its most prominent black executives last year. But Apple has a much bigger issue: The huge number of Chinese manufacturing employees it has kept at poverty-level wages, despite repeated calls from human rights groups and journalists for change.
Dr. King is best known for focusing on changing laws, but he was also concerned with the impact of economic injustice on human rights. At the March on Washington in 1963, King’s historic “I Have A Dream” speech began by noting that African-Americans — despite having been legally emancipated 100 years earlier — were still not actually free, as they lived on “a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” One goal of the March was to establish a $2 minimum wage for all workers; the minimum wage had previously been created to combat exploitive sweatshops that paid laborers less than would cover the basic necessities of life.
Nearly 55 years later, Apple is one of the largest exploiters of underpaid laborers in the world. In the name of generating the biggest annual profit in corporate history and incredible (over 38 percent) margins, Apple’s manufacturing relies substantially on poorly-paid Chinese workers — except in countries such as India and Brazil, which require some domestic assembly to avoid punitive taxation. This is the reason virtually all of Apple’s products are badged “Designed in California, Assembled in China.” Apple, the Chinese government, and key manufacturers Foxconn and Pegatron have cooperated to make this work on a hitherto unimaginable scale.