After unveiling profits that smashed expectations and broke revenue records, it’s been a big week for Apple, but a recent investigative report brings the company’s rosy report crashing back to earth. After a string of highly publicized suicides at Foxconn in 2009, Apple pledged to clean up its act and tighten policies on worker health and quality of life. The company’s decision to release its list of suppliers after years of stonewalling is a positive step towards this goal, but evidence shows there’s a long way to go.

Apple is legendary for demanding extraordinary levels of control. On several occasions, Steve Jobs either changed announcement plans at the last moment, canceled deals, or refused to deal with press publications that disrupted his carefully laid plans for a product demonstration or unveiling. The company requires absolute transparency from companies like Foxconn, carefully scrutinizing their manufacturing and employee costs — then dictates to the company what margin they’ll be allowed to maintain.

“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market told the New York Times. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.”

Aluminium dust is extremely explosive – this image is from 2007, when a Chinese truck carrying it ignited

The Foxconn suicides from several years ago may have made national headlines in the US, but they aren’t the only problem. Twice this year, iPad polishing facilities at Foxconn have exploded due to buildups of aluminium dust. One dust explosion at a plant is a regrettable accident; two within six months is evidence of a manufacturer that’s disregarding well-known safety procedures. Foxconn isn’t the only manufacturer at fault — in 2010, workers at Wintek went on strike after more than 100 of them began showing signs of n-hexane poisoning. The toxic chemical was used to clean iPhone screens because it has an evaporation rate three times faster than isopropyl alcohol.

Each time such events occur, Apple issues a report claiming to have investigated the incident and resolved the problem. The problem with such after-the-fact resolutions is that they clash with the company’s ironclad control over every aspect of manufacturing. Dell might not notice if a supplier changed the chemical it used to clean its displays, but you can bet someone at Apple signed off on that decision, which means they share some degree of prior responsibility for the welfare of the workers in question.

A story from the NYT on why Apple products can’t be manufactured in the US anymore sheds some light on how the company views its manufacturing partners. An unnamed former executive described how Chinese manufacturers reacted when Apple issued a last-minute redesign on the iPhone’s screen.

“New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. “The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

The implication of the quote is that such manufacturing jobs have gone overseas because Americans don’t want to work that hard. Take a moment and think about the deeper implications of the situation. Imagine an employer that can wake you at midnight after a full day of work and pull you in for a 12 hour shift. Note that the situation — a last minute product change — virtually guarantees that it won’t be your only 12 hour shift that week; it’s on top of the 72+ hours you regularly work. Apple officially requires Chinese suppliers to restrict workers to 60 hours a week, paystub checks by investigative journalists reveal this is generally ignored, with late workers forced to write confession letters or copy quotations.

Your reward for all that hard work? Aluminium dust and n-hexane poisoning. You can almost hear Apple executives chortling in the background “They’re just like little robots!”

Except they aren’t.

If Apple enforced its employee treatment agreements with the same tenacity as its product controls, these sorts of issues wouldn’t exist — indeed, they would’ve been stopped before they started. Apple reported $46.33 billion in revenue two days ago, including $13.06B in net profits. The company can afford to loosen to purse strings a little and allow suppliers higher margins — especially if it mandates that the additional funds are invested in worker safety.