Corporate Social Responsibility—Blog 2

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/98649/7292824.html#

Corporate Social Responsibility is a company’s obligation to strive for achieving social environmental and economic development. In order to achieve such development, one of the responsibilities of a company is to ensure the safety and health of their workers. Recently, authorities have accused Apple of failing to accomplish this.

It is said that Apple has recently forced 137 injured workers to leave their jobs at their factories following their exposure to a strongly toxic chemical cleaning agent, N-hexane. Workers were using this chemical to clean the Apple logo. The workers were from Suzhou Facility of Wintek, one of Apple’s touch screen suppliers.

One of the affected workers was located. His name’s Jia JingChuan, a 27 year old worker. According to him, “They [Apple] promised to give me 140,000 Yuan or 21,253 U.S Dollars, in compensation of my [Jia’s] departure, but only on one condition that I sign an exemption agreement, which means the company would not take any responsibility if my health worsens in the future.” Eight workers already left, but Jia has struggled to stay since he has no idea how he could be able to pay for the medical fees if he leaves.

Tradtionally, the public has known Apple for meeting up to the public standards as being socially responsible as a company. However, this exposure has surely tainted its image even as the administrative staff denied the events. Whether or not this would affect the sales of their product is yet to be determined. But Apple does need to revise their ethics in order to gain back their once privileged reputation.

RTsmith