The iPhone 5C is expected to have weak sales in Q4 2013 according to TrendForce and we’ve already seen one of Apple’s suppliers for the phone, Pegatron, cut back to producing 80,000 units per day. It looks like things aren’t going too well at Pegatron these days as it’s being reported a teenager died recently.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting one of Pegatron’s 15-year-old workers, Shi Zhaokun, died of pneumonia this past October. As you’d expect, Pegatron denies its workplace environment wasn’t responsible for the teenager’s death, and even went on to acknowledge “several other young workers at the factory had also died in the past few months.”
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, activist group China Labor Watch isn’t accepting Pegatron’s explanation, saying “considering the sudden deaths of five people and the similar reason of the deaths, we believe there should be some relations between the tragedy and the working conditions in the factory.”
Pegatron’s response really doesn’t make it look any better in the eyes of the public. A company should respond to an employee’s death by saying, “Well, there were other employees that died recently too. Why didn’t you make a big deal out of those people?” That doesn’t give us the feeling of a safe working environment.