Chinese supplier Pegatron has been in the spotlight before, and not for reasons that are positive in the first place. Well, it seems that the company is in the limelight once again, having come under scrutiny after a bunch of employee deaths which were associated with its iPhone 5c production factory. There was an example where 15-year-old Shi Zhaokun finally gave in to pneumonia after having to work nearly 280 hours in his first month alone at the factory. Needless to say, this was definitely in violation of local labor regulations as well as Apple’s supplier code of conduct. One does wonder, however, with Pegatron having violated Apple’s supplier code of conduct, why can’t Apple choose a different supplier after all these years? Are there no capable suppliers apart from Pegatron to continue rolling out the slew of iDevices?
Shi Zhaokun apparently used a fake identification card so that he could get around China’s minimum hiring age laws, and there was a seeming lack of will to enforce government laws that cap the maximum working hours per week at 60 hours, whereas Zhaokun was said to have worked between 75 and 79 hours for the first three weeks there. Pegatron claimed that Zhaokun’s health issues had nothing to do with his job at the iPhone 5c factory, and the worker logs did not depict an accurate representation of his working and rest hours.
