Labor standards in China have re-emerged as a concern for global corporations this summer, after a series of worker suicides this year at a sprawling electronics manufacturer that counts Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and many other Western companies among its customers.
The problem for corporate compliance and risk executives in the United States is a troubling one. The manufacturer, Foxconn, does obey the workplace safety and wage standards required by the Chinese government, so in the strictest sense, compliance isn’t an issue. But that doesn’t make quality-of-life issues—and the unwanted publicity and activism they spur in Western countries—go away. And many manufacturing shops in China actually do allow improper work conditions, far worse than anything Foxconn does.
