Tim Cook’s Dark Legacy in China

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 above the legal cap. This August we found a full-time assembly worker at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant on a base wage of 2,450 yuan a month, about $363, a little above the city’s legal minimum of 2,350 yuan. To reach 4,200 yuan he has to work 60-hour weeks, totaling roughly 87 hours of overtime a month, against a statutory ceiling of 36. Raising his base wage by 1,750 yuan, about $260 a month, would let him earn the income he needs on a legal schedule. Even if all 200,000 workers employed at peak operating times received that increase for a full year, the cost would be roughly $620 million – about half of one percent of Apple’s $112 billion in net income in the year to September. Clearly, Apple can afford to pay more. The discrepancy, then, points to a deeper issue: labor conditions are not given the same priority as output, speed, and profit margin. Look at how Apple manages suppliers. Yield rates and delivery deadlines are tracked precisely. Missing them can cost a supplier its orders. A labor violation, by contrast, will just produce another audit. Foxconn went through the 2010 suicides and has gone through one labor dispute after another since. To this day it remains one of Apple’s most important partners. Suppliers know exactly which metrics are most important to Apple. Apple could have set an enforceable wage floor and made labor conditions matter as much as quality and delivery. It has not. China has changed, economically and politically. If Apple wants to keep relying on China as its main production base, maintaining the old model now comes at a higher price in both Beijing and Washington. Apple has been willing to pay that price. It has never paid a comparable price to the people who build its phones. As if the suffering of thousands of workers wasn’t enough, there are other costs as well. When the United States preaches labor rights while its most emblematic company leaves Chinese workers dependent on illegal overtime to live, the contradiction erodes the very labor and human rights standards it promotes. Cook proved Apple can control how an iPhone is made. He never showed that Apple is willing to take responsibility for the welfare of the people who make those phones. For 20 years Apple’s priorities have been consistent: production first, responsibility second. On September 1, Ternus inherits the manufacturing system Cook helped create – and the unpaid debt to the workers who power that system. Whether the debt is paid will not be recorded in the next Supplier Responsibility Report, but it will show up in how the worker on the line describes America to everyone he knows.