Amazon says it expects its manufacturers to protect whistleblowers, but that wasn’t enough to help a manager who raised alarms about labor violations involving teenage workers at a Chinese factory that made Kindles and Echos.
In 2019, the manager secretly sent records showing how the factory’s student interns were underpaid and working overtime illegally to an activist group, which published a report about the records. The factory’s owner, Foxconn Technology, the biggest consumer electronics manufacturer in the world, fired the executives in charge of the factory and the factory’s human resources department, issued a public apology amid scores of critical news reports on the issue, and raised wages for employees. Then it went looking for the whistleblower.
