Okay Geek Farm
Are Apple's Chinese workers being treated poorly?
Brandon Davenport
Last year, Apple was held over the flames for information released about their Chinese workers and namely Foxconn workers. It seemed to have been settled and all acusations were put to rest, but now it’s starting to all un-ravel once again, with Foxconn in the limelight. Is Apple really letting Foxconn treat their workers that poorly? Well according to this, they might in fact be doing just that.
Recently, two NGOs decided to take a field trip to China and meet with the workers. During their stay in China, they performed some routine research and came across some pretty shocking discoveries. The overall investigation detailed the life of 500,000 Foxconn workers at the Shenzhen and Chengdu factories. Foxconn produces millions of Apple products every year and the more they produce, the clearer it becomes — the high cost of inexpensive labour.
The report by the NGOs accuses Foxconn that their workers (we think they deserve to be called employees) are treated “inhumanely, like machines”. The report has also uncovered an “anti-suicide” pledge that workers at the two plants have been forced to sign, after a series of employee deaths last year. This raises some alarm bells because even though the suicide ratio for the 500,000 Foxconn workers was shown by Apple to be much lower than here in the U.S. the workers are still forced to sign these pledges. It’s either Foxconn covering their butts, or there is a bigger issue at hand, and the numbers were skewed a little too much.
Claims from the NGOs
Points from The Guardian
- Excessive overtime is routine, despite a legal limit of 36 hours a month. One payslip, seen by the Observer, indicated that the worker had performed 98 hours of overtime in a month.
- Workers attempting to meet the huge demand for the first iPad were sometimes pressured to take only one day off in 13.
- In some factories badly performing workers are required to be publicly humiliated in front of colleagues.
- Crowded workers’ dormitories can sleep up to 24 and are subject to strict rules. One worker told the NGO investigators that he was forced to sign a “confession letter” after illicitly using a hairdryer. In the letter he wrote: “It is my fault. I will never blow my hair inside my room. I have done something wrong. I will never do it again.”
- In the wake of a spate of suicides at Foxconn factories last summer, workers were asked to sign a statement promising not to kill themselves and pledging to “treasure their lives”.
In Summary
The Chinese people building on Apple’s products do an ourstanding job, and we thank them for making it possible to have these cool gadgets, but we also think it is extremely un-fair for Foxconn not to treat them like a working class citizen with a family and other interests besides standing in humid factories for 12 hours. Nobody wants to have an iPhone in their pocket knowing that the process of building it only brought misery to the workers of Foxconn, and that the people who did the back breaking work only got a paycheck equivilent of a rounding error compared to those of Apple and Foxconn corporate employees.
