Apple Inc.AAPL -1.09% supplier Pegatron Corp.4938.TW +0.13% began using facial recognition technology this year to screen applicants for its iPhone plant, illustrating how some companies are guarding against the growing problem of underage workers making their way into factories in China.
Taiwan-based Pegatron, the primary manufacturer of the iPhone 5C, for the first time gave a detailed description of the system it uses to filter tens of thousands of workers for its assembly lines in Shanghai.
The death of 15-year-old Shi Zhaokun after he worked for a month at Pegatron has sparked renewed scrutiny over the company’s factory conditions, although Apple and Pegatron both say their investigations showed Mr. Shi’s death from pneumonia wasn’t connected with work conditions.
The legal working age in China is 16.
Pegatron said applicants for its assembly line have their government-issued IDs checked for authenticity. Their faces are then matched to their ID photos through facial recognition technology, to weed out those using borrowed ID cards. Their names are also checked against police records.
In theory, these measures should keep out underage workers, as they should catch people using fake or borrowed IDs. In Mr. Shi’s case, he was able to obtain a government-issued ID card that included his photo but another person’s identifying information, the company said.
Underage labor has long been a problem at China’s factories. The spotlight has been trained closely on manufacturers making products for Apple, the world’s most valuable company.
Apple’s largest supplier, Foxconn, has previously been found to have hired underage interns for its assembly line.
A report by the Fair Labor Association last week said that Foxconn was still exceeding the legal overtime hours, but auditors didn’t find interns since January. Foxconn said it welcomed the audit report, and that it demonstrated substantial progress at the company, although “we recognize that there is more to be done.”
Pegatron has become a more important Apple supplier in the past year, and the scrutiny of labor groups over the company’s factories has grown accordingly. The labor activist group China Labor Watch first flagged Mr. Shi’s death last week.
Both Pegatron and Foxconn have been making efforts to boost automation at their factories in response to labor problems, but costs and the rapid changes in technology pose challenges.
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