Global Electronics Industry: Poster Child of 21st Century Sweatshops and Despoiler of the Environment?

It sounds like headlines ripped from newspapers about global sweatshops in the 1990s: huge factories of women workers producing consumer products for Europe and the United States under conditions of long hours, low pay, impossibly high production quotas, often unsafe machinery and unhealthy workplace exposures and sometimes abusive treatment by supervisors and managers.

Unions are banned; wages are docked for infractions of “factory rules;” weeks of mandatory overtime occur without a day off; the legal minimum wage becomes the ceiling, not the floor; overtime wages are owed but never paid; large “recruitment fees” put migrant workers deeply in debt; and labor laws are suspended altogether in the “export processing zones” filled with sub-contractor plants producing for global “brand name” retailers.

But these are not reports from apparel, toy or sports shoe factories 15 years ago at the dawn of the “anti-sweatshop” movement, but rather documented conditions found in the global electronics industry at the end of the 21st century's first decade. (For a list of just some of the most recent reports issued by academic researchers and non-governmental organizations visit http://mhssn.igc.org/ListReports.htm).

Moreover, it's not only worker exposures in the production process that are problematic. The raw materials used by the electronics industry include vast amounts of water (the 21st century's oil) and metals torn from the four corners of the earth, including aluminum, copper, lithium, tantalum, tin and cobalt (mined in Africa, cobalt is the electronics industry equivalent of “blood diamonds”).

And then there is the ever-growing tsunami of electronic waste that has flooded countries like China, Ghana and India, where it is “processed” in rudimentary workshops, often by children, in ways that poison the workers and pollute the environment.

LEARNING FROM OTHERS' MISTAKES

For the first 10 years or so of the global anti-sweatshop movement, the electronics industry generally got a “bye” from campaigners. In part this was due to the industry's successful public relations efforts to portray itself as a “clean industry,” despite the greatest concentration of EPA Superfund hazardous waste sites anywhere in the United States — 29 sites in California's Silicon Valley where the industry was born.

Fifteen years later, the global electronics industry — computers, cell phones, game consoles — has become the “new Nike,” the target of growing publicity and pressure campaigns. In some ways, the electronics industry has learned from the mistakes of the garment and sports equipment sectors.

In 2001, the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) was formed in Europe, and in 2004, U.S. tech corporations established an “Electronics Industry Code of Conduct,” with the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) formed in 2007. EICC now has 45 member companies representing 3.4 million employees and $1.2 trillion in sales.

EICC is trying to establish its code of conduct as the common denominator for the entire industry and to conduct joint or shared factory audits to overcome the “audit fatigue” of monitoring dozens of different codes. EICC companies have established the usual corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability departments, and have issued the usual glossy annual CSR reports.

The electronics industry definitely is ahead of the historic curve in jumping into numerous “stakeholder engagement” activities with labor rights and environmental, non-governmental organizations. The industry's PR campaigns are more polished than those of garment or toy transnationals.

But in a more fundamental way, the electronics industry is making exactly the same mistakes as the sweatshop targets of the 1990s. The all-voluntary EICC code of conduct has been heavily criticized for not including key provisions of the International Labor Organization's (ILO) core labor rights conventions.

The monitoring of EICC code compliance in supplier factories has been done through “self-assessment” questionnaires and discredited in-house and “third party” audit protocols — all with only a small percentage of plants in the supply chain. EICC's 2008 annual report acknowledges that 25 percent of member companies do not even require a “corrective action plan” of their suppliers when “a major issue was identified.”

Lack of transparency also is a major issue as the audit reports of supplier factories are not publicly available, and there is no independent verification that violations of national law or company codes have been corrected. Nor is any information available about measures, if any, taken to prevent these violations from occurring again.

Except for Dell and Hewlett Packard, the names of sub-contracted supplier companies are not disclosed by the industry. The name and location of the factories actually producing brand name consumer goods are not reported by anyone.

Not surprisingly, EICC and individual corporation audit summaries indicate a global supply chain with many problems. Industry CSR leader HP reported in April 2009 on its 2008 audits of 129 factories, saying that 99 plants required follow-up visits due to code non-compliance, and that the “two sections with the greatest number of major non-conformances — health and safety and labor — have improved less than other areas.”

HP reported 51 percent of audited facilities violated code provisions on working hours, while 26 percent to 50 percent of facilities violated wage and benefits requirements. When Apple reported the results of its 2008 supplier audits, it noted that 59 percent of plants violated working hours and day of rest provisions, 41 percent violated wage and benefit requirements and 26 percent of facilities violated code prohibitions of discrimination (usually worker pregnancy tests and related firings).

Many similarities exist between electronics and the garment/toy/sports equipment sectors — same overwhelmingly female, often migrant, workers; same extended supply chain structure; same rapid shuffling of suppliers and factory locations; same problems with wages, hours and labor practices; and similar problems with workplace health and safety hazards.