Describe Apple’s Corporate Social Responsibility (Essay Sample)

Apple’s Corporate Social Responsibility
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Institution - Affiliated
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Introduction
Corporate social responsibility policy, commonly referred to as CSR policy, refers to a type of a corporate’s own self-regulation policy whereby a business ensures that it complies with the law, average ethics and international standards. This usually goes a scope higher when the CSR policy of doing social good goes beyond the firm’s interest and what they are required by regulations. The CSR policy also outlines the Supplier Code of Conduct amongst other issues. The Supplier Code usually outlines the expectations of a corporate on the suppliers it is engaged in business with. However, most multinational corporations have been scrutinized for not following their own CSR policy or even worse off, not having one. In response to this criticism the corporates claim that at times they are usually at a dilemma on how to enforce some clauses in their own SRC policies.
Discussion
Apple Inc. has in the past been on the receiving end of criticism by the media. This follows claims that there’s limited transparency of Apple’s policy on supplier sustainability. The claims that despite Apple providing a CSR policy, its suppliers have constantly violated most of the policies. This violations can be traced back to the Apple management. The main conflicts involved; labour and human rights conflict and workers health and safety. The dilemma for Apple is most probably that despite providing policies to the suppliers, they still have the social responsibility of ensuring the policies are upheld (Schipper 2015). This is because if they do not do this, in case of a supplier not conforming to the policies, they will be held responsible.
The case of labour and human rights indicated that suppliers of Apple had factories that had very poor management. For instance, it is alleged that there was a high number of suicide cases. This was attributed to the hard working conditions including underpayment and overworking. Further claims stated that there was employment of underage workers in some of the factories. When Apple was conducting the audits, some employees of Foxconn claim that the people who committed suicide are not directly linked with overworking but other aspects such as relationship. Some employees live and work in good conditions and therefore this paints a double picture of the suppliers to Apple and it becomes hard for them to take any action (Dudovskiy 2016). This means that there are some workers who are enjoying the facilities in the campus and some are not.
More audits can be conducted by Apple on their suppliers and ensure they enforce the policies such that the suppliers who are not complying are cut off. These audits should incorporate the workers directly and not just some of their supervisors so that they can know about the working conditions and ages of workers. Apple should not just train human res...