Flip side of Apple’s trillion dollars worth

It is no longer news that Apple is the first public company to be rated to worth a trillion dollars. That’s incredible and rightly so. It’s beautiful.

On the other side of the picture though, is something not as beautiful; the cruel underpayment of employees in companies producing outsourced Apple accessories.

I watched a documentary on Al Jazeera some months where it was revealed that the labour cost of an iphone is less than one per cent. It broke my heart, it is extremely unfair and inhuman.

In the documentary, a Chinese factory producing outsourced Apple accessories was featured. In that factory, the employees are people from rural areas who migrate into the urban areas in search of jobs.

There was so much pressure on the workers that it resulted in psychological problems. They were working like robots, they could not make mistakes else the boss would shout and reprimand them excessively.

In a stipulated time frame, there were 24 suicide attempts out of which 18 was successful. The suicide pattern was that the employee went to the top of the building and jumped down. The factory’s CCTV cameras caught one, it was saddening.

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One of the six survivors, who was confined to a wheelchair was interviewed and she narrated her experience. All those workers were treated so badly that they lost the will to live.

This is not peculiar to Apple alone. A host of these big companies have similar stories. And as shown in the documentary, these companies are regularly on the move, migrating to countries of cheaper labour and less stringent government regulations.

We still have modern slavery and stories like this are just examples. Outsourcing is one big source of modern slavery. It is down to the governments of the world to protect their people.

Adeyemi Ahmed Abiodun

adeyemiahmedabiodun@gmail.com