This is kind of what fair trade certification tries to address.
The issue is that a company like Apple will require in the contract certain things like wage minimum or environmental requirements, but the winning bid will be below the amount required to actually fulfill those requirements.
It’s not even that the manufacturer set out to ignore Apple’s requirements, but what happens is that these bids have zero margin of error built in. So once something unexpected happens(lower order volume, initial inaccurate estimation, tax or regulatory changes, etc) these companies are faced with a choice. If they cannot renegotiate the contract they are forced to either reduce salaries, cut environmental and quality corners, or run at a loss and go out of business.
The very nature of this type of third party bidding for a few large and powerful customers is that you are almost guaranteed a high percentage of labor and environmental violations because the companies will eventually be forced to chose between that and insolvency.
The issue is that a company like Apple will require in the contract certain things like wage minimum or environmental requirements, but the winning bid will be below the amount required to actually fulfill those requirements.
It’s not even that the manufacturer set out to ignore Apple’s requirements, but what happens is that these bids have zero margin of error built in. So once something unexpected happens(lower order volume, initial inaccurate estimation, tax or regulatory changes, etc) these companies are faced with a choice. If they cannot renegotiate the contract they are forced to either reduce salaries, cut environmental and quality corners, or run at a loss and go out of business.
The very nature of this type of third party bidding for a few large and powerful customers is that you are almost guaranteed a high percentage of labor and environmental violations because the companies will eventually be forced to chose between that and insolvency.