Supply Chain Audits

Apple recently issued its annual Supplier Responsibility report for 2010 and they are getting some bad press for it.   IT blogger Engadget writes, "The findings are pretty damning on the whole, with more than half (54 percent) of all factories failing to meet Apple's already inflated maximum 60-hour work week, 24 percent paying less than the minimum wage, 37 percent failing to respect anti-discrimination rules, and three facilities holding records of employing a total of eleven 15-year olds (who were over the legal age of 16 or had left by the time of the audit)."  


While these are certainly nothing to be proud of, the fact that Apple is bringing these results to light should be applauded.  Not every company with a supply chain even does such an audit, so the fact that they do, is a step in the right direction.