Apple in hot water over student workers at major iPhone supplier in Taiwan 

Apple attracts the most criticism in the tech industry over labour and environmental standards. 

Apple's decision to suspend new business with a key supplier highlights just how hard it is for the world’s biggest tech company to find partners that are both reliable and do the right thing by their workers. The problem may be of its own making.

Pegatron won’t get any new contracts after the Taipei-based company was found to have committed labour violations related to its student workers’ programme at factories in China. 

According to Apple, some were misclassified and allowed to do night shifts and overtime, in contravention of the company’s rules. 

Its statement was telling: "We have a rigorous review and approval process for any student worker programme, which ensures the intern’s work is related to their major and prohibits overtime or night shifts." 

The term student worker programme should ring immediate alarm bells for anyone who cares about workers' rights. 

Getting college or vocational students to work factory production lines is an accepted practice in China that foreign clients including Apple and Samsung Electronics have signed onto for years. 

Apple at least asks its manufacturing partners to ensure the work relates to their studies. Under the pressure to churn out product, though, such programmes are vulnerable to abuse.

Pegatron said it fired the manager responsible, whom it said “went to extraordinary lengths to evade our oversight mechanisms”. 

Still, we need to question what conditions incentivised employees to work so hard to not only break Apple’s labour code, but also make such efforts to cover their tracks.

This isn’t the first time Pegatron has appeared in print alongside allegations of labour violations. As far back as 2014, China Labour Watch named the company, alongside Catcher Technology, Jabil, and Foxconn Technology, for failing to undertake corrective action related to labour and safety standards.

Apple attracts the most criticism in the tech industry over labour and environmental standards. 

This partly reflects ever-stricter rules that the company has imposed on its supply-chain partners, the results of which Apple publicises in its annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report.

Critics may argue that this is a marketing exercise designed to make consumers feel more comfortable about buying shiny gadgets produced by cheap labour — which helped to yield $57bn (€48bn) of profit for Apple last year. 

Yet, incidents like this show that for all its talent and money, the US company doesn’t control its suppliers as much as it might wish. 

• Bloomberg