Apple has been hitting headlines in India lately but not for good reasons. Its supplier Wistron’s facility near Bengaluru, India, recently got attacked by workers demanding unpaid wages. Now, as Reuters says the company has put Wistron on notice.
According to the report, an early audit by Apple reveals that Wistron has violated the “Supplier Code of Conduct”. Apparently, it didn’t manage the working hours properly and this led to delay in payment wages. Precisely, as Wistron admits it didn’t pay some workers during October and November on time. In case you don’t know, Wistron assembles Apple’s iPhones like iPhone 7 and iPhone SE 2020.
The report says that Wistron planned to expand operations by hiring 20,000 workers in a year. However, it couldn’t cope up with the scale of manpower, violated several laws which led to the outrage. Also, the inspection result by Karnataka Govt reveals Wistron had 5,500 workers more than the allowed number.
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Some of the other violations include improper HR management, underpayment of wages for contract workers, housekeeping staff. The company has also made female staff work overtime without proper authorization.
As a result of this, the report says Wistron will face delays in production due to Apple’s probationary action. This will take dent over its earlier ₹13 billion($177 million) commitment for the next five years to leverage the PLI scheme. If you recall, the Indian Govt recently approved cash incentives of 4-6% of the Sale of goods locally made in next 5yrs from 2019-2020.
That said, Apple says it will continue to monitor how Wistron manages to mitigate the violent attack which made it lose millions of dollars of property, Gears, and iPhones. Apart from Wistron, Apple’s other suppliers Foxconn, Pegatron are also expanding production in Vietnam, India.
