In a radio interview on the syndicated show Conversations on Health Care, Apple COO Jeff Williams said that the reason Apple has come under attack for the use of child labor in its supply chain is that the company actively goes out looking for it. Other companies, he said, simply keep their heads down.

Apple has come under fire over the years when underage workers were found in the company’s supply chain, and Williams has spoken before about Apple’s unusual stance on these issues …

No company wants to talk about child labor. They don’t want to be associated with that. We shine a light on it. We go out and search for cases where an underage worker is found in a factory somewhere and then we take drastic actions with the supplier and the labor groups to try and make a change.

Then we report it publicly every year. We take a lot of heat for that. But we think the only way to make change is to go hit it head-on and talk about it.

Back in 2014, when a Panorama documentary found that child labor was used in Indonesian tin mines, whose output feeds into the Apple supply chain, Williams said that it was more moral to work for change than simply to walk away.

Apple noted in its annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report that it tries to work with suppliers to ensure compliance with the company’s standards, and drops those which refuse to cooperate. Business Insider noted that Apple’s most recent report involved carrying out a total of 633 audits covering 1.6 million workers, with 16 cases of child labor detected.

Apple has two choices: We could make sure all of our suppliers buy tin from smelters outside of Indonesia, which would probably be the easiest thing for us to do and would certainly shield us from criticism. But it would be the lazy and cowardly path, because it would do nothing to improve the situation for Indonesian workers or the environment since Apple consumes a tiny fraction of the tin mined there. We chose the second path, which is to stay engaged and try to drive a collective solution.

Williams said that making a positive difference in the world was what most motivated his team, and he pointed to the power of HealthKit and ResearchKit to make a huge difference to healthcare in developing countries.

He gave the example of autism, which often goes undiagnosed until it is too late. He said that very early diagnosis allows interventions that affect the development of the brain, and that there are apps that can facilitate this.

Photo: Reuters