Do you have evidence that Apple’s less successful competitors are less sociopathic? https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2016/06/drc-cobalt-child-labour/
This seems like the kind of story where it is easy to just confirm ones biases. Perspective 1: Apple didn't get to be one of the largest companies in the world by making a priority of labor standards. Businesses are motivated by profit, and maximizing profit means minimizing costs. Investigating labor conditions increases costs. Rejecting cheaper suppliers because they have substandard labor standards increases costs. Apple spends a trivial amount of annual revenue producing self-serving Supplier Responsibility reports because doing so is cheaper than actually insisting on supplier responsibility. Perspective 2: Businesses are motivated by profit, and maximizing profit means maximizing revenue. Revenue comes from customers, and customers are motivated largely by price but also by reputation. The difference between UPS and FedEx or Walmart and Target is slim, and relies heavily on brand identity. Nike can't afford to lose market share to Adidas over a sweatshop scandal. It is more cost-effective to insist on supplier responsibility than to risk getting in the news for mistreated workers (and, while lesser-known brands get a pass, the news loves to drag big corporate names through the mud). Hence Apple not only maintains labor standards, but investigates suppliers and suspends work when standards are not met. And Apple does not do this secretly, but promotes the suspension and publishes their supplier list. There is such a thing as bad publicity: Volkswagen sales plunge on emissions scandal "BP gas station owners across the country are divided over whether the oil giant stained by its handling of the Gulf spill should rebrand U.S. outlets as Amoco or another name as part of efforts to repair the company's badly damaged reputation." At Wells Fargo, "although the financial impact was trivial, the reputational damage proved to be enormous."
Perspective 3: Politics is history and history is narrative. To you, this is capitalists gotta capital and errbody uses slave labor despite the fact that we're talking about literal slave labor, actual slaves from actual prison camps. Nike and Adidas are interchangeable because fashion has no differentiation to you and the utility of UPS over Fedex depending on drop off locations, rates or delivery success rate is an externality to your equation. To journalists, it's all about the angle. No amount of "China is building concentration camps" diatribe has moved the needle on China so you go for the Smug - "your ProductRED iPhone was assembled in part by Uyghurs." It's not like the meatpacking industry was sweetness and light until six weeks before Upton SInclair published The Jungle, it was that Upton Sinclair managed to find an angle that made people give a shit all of a sudden. St. Milton himself said that corporations have a fiduciary duty to be as nefarious as they can fucking get away with in pursuit of profits. The obvious counterstrategy is to limit what they can get away with. For a number of different reasons.