Pacific Money | Economy | Opinion | East Asia

Tim Cook’s Dark Legacy in China

Cook’s leadership perfected Apple’s production – but Chinese workers paid the price.

On September 1, 2026, Tim Cook will hand over control of Apple to John Ternus. He leaves behind one of the most efficient manufacturing systems in consumer electronics, one he helped build as operations chief from 1998.

In China, Cook leaves a second, but related, legacy: workers on Apple lines toiling 60 hours a week or more, often without a rest day and depending on overtime to cover the basic cost of living.

Ternus will have to decide how to handle both of these realities.

At China Labor Watch, we just completed a new investigation into Apple’s supply chains in China. Our conclusion is not simply that Apple’s compliance system fails to prevent violations. Many of the labor conditions that the report identified are baked into the production model itself.

I once asked a worker on an Apple line at a Foxconn factory what he made of the human rights standards Western countries talk about. He called them Western propaganda. What taught him about America, he said, was not standards on paper but the machine-like pace of Apple’s line and pay he was never sure would arrive.

Since 2006 we have investigated Apple’s suppliers in China, publishing 19 reports. I have come to believe blaming Apple alone would be unfair. Apple’s supply chain in China was built on a trade. China needed foreign capital, technology, and jobs. In return, Western firms got cheap labor and speed built on long overtime and extreme scheduling flexibility.

The Chinese government, Apple, and the supplier factories all bear responsibility for the conditions workers face. But Apple has treated allegations of wrongdoing as a compliance problem, rather than the output of its own production model. 

Apple’s product cycles are fast, and launches send order volumes sharply higher. Suppliers work on thin margins and must deliver enormous volumes quickly. The component prices are set; equipment costs are sunk. There is only one place left to ensure profits: labor costs. Workers’ hours and income become the buffer, absorbing the volatility Apple itself generates.

Apple’s answer has been to police this through a Supplier Code of Conduct, audits, public reporting and worker training. While these steps do have an impact, the overall pattern is clear: individual violations may be corrected, but the same problems return.

In 2019 we found withheld wages at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant. At the same plant, more than half the workforce was on dispatch contracts, far above the legal cap of 10 percent. Apple disputed most of our findings but acknowledged excessive use of dispatch workers. In 2022 thousands at the same plant clashed with police over pay promised at recruitment; Foxconn apologized, blaming a computer input error. In 2025 we found dispatch workers still being used........

© The Diplomat