Apple Backslides on Work-Hour Limits

Apple sold more iPhones last year than anyone could have imagined. But the company found that a lower percentage of factories assembling its products complied with a policy preventing excessive work hours.

The company's policy limits factory workers to a 60-hour workweek. Apple said it had found that 92 percent of the more than 1.1 million workers in its supply chain worked no more than 60 hours a week last year, compared with 95 percent in 2013.

Apple sold an enormous number of iPhones last year - last quarter alone, it sold 74.5 million smartphones - so it is not surprising that factories pushed more of their workers over the limits.

Things also do not appear as grim as they did six years ago, when Apple said 41 percent of audited factories were compliant with the 60-hour maximum workweek in 2008.

Apple declined to comment on the decrease in compliance with its 60-hour maximum workweek. Jeff Williams, Apple's head of operations, argued in a letter published online that every violation discovered by the company could lead to improvements.

"People sometimes point to the discovery of problems as evidence that our process isn't working. Nothing could be further from the truth," Williams wrote.

On the same day that Apple published the audit results, China Labor Watch, a workers' rights group based in New York, published a report on conditions at some factories that make Apple products. It noted that pay stubs for workers at Pegatron, a supplier that works on iPhones and iPads, revealed they worked an average of 60 hours or more a week, and 52 percent of workers worked 90 hours of overtime each month. However, its sample size was small - the audit was an inspection of 96 pay stubs of Pegatron workers last month.

Apple said it had made significant progress eliminating the use of conflict minerals, a term used to describe minerals that come from areas engaged in warfare. Apple said its report had verified 135 conflict-free smelters - machines used for cooking down rock to extract metal - compared with 57 smelters in 2013.

© 2015 New York Times News Service