Friday, February 10, 2012

Apple’s Brand Is at Stake as Customers Demand Better Labor Practices - Business - GOOD:

Even online activists get off their Macbook Pros once in awhile for real live action. Media coverage of problems with Apple's supply chain and labor practices in China, including child labor, worker suicides, and dangerous workplaces, has led to mounting pressure for reform. Online organizers from Change.org and SumofUs.org delivered over 250,000 hard copies of their respective Apple petitions to the company’s new store in New York’s Grand Central Station this morning.

At 10 a.m., wearing sandwich boards in the shape of iPads, Change.org representatives Shelby Knox and Sarah Ryan, along with playwright Mike Daisey, calmly climbed the terminal’s east staircase—at the top of which resides one of Apple’s most glamorous new stores. There, the three handed over several cardboard file boxes heavy with Apple consumers’ discontent and disgust.