Foxconn, headquartered in Taiwan, is reported by Wikipedia to be the world’s largest manufacturer of electronic components, and the largest private employer in China. It employs an estimated 1 million Chinese workers, including 300,000 to 450,000 at its walled factory complex in Shenzen province. It is a subcontractor for Apple, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Microsoft, Japan’s Nintendo and Sony, Korea’s Samsung and Finland’s Nokia.
Recently Foxconn has had so many suicides by stressed-out Chinese employees that it requires new hires to sign a no-suicide pledge. As England’s Daily Mail reported:
Factories making sought-after Apple iPads and iPhones in China are forcing staff to sign pledges not to commit suicide, an investigation has revealed.
At least 14 workers at Foxconn factories in China have killed themselves in the last 16 months as a result of horrendous working conditions.
Many more are believed to have either survived attempts or been stopped before trying at the Apple supplier’s plants in Chengdu or Shenzen.
After a spate of suicides last year, managers at the factories ordered new staff to sign pledges that they would not attempt to kill themselves, according to researchers.
And they were made to promise that if they did, their families would only seek the legal minimum in damages.
An investigation of the 500,000 workers by the Centre for Research on Multinational Companies and Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (Sacom) found appalling conditions in the factories.
They claimed that:
# Excessive overtime was rife, despite a legal limit of 36 hours a month. One payslip showed a worker did 98 hours of overtime in one month … .
# During peak periods of demand for the iPad, workers were made to take only one day off in 13.
# Badly performing workers were humiliated in front of colleagues.
# Workers are banned from talking and are made to stand up for their 12-hour shifts. … …
Foxconn admits that it breaks overtime laws, but claims all the overtime is voluntary.
Some officials within the company even accused workers of committing suicide to secure large compensation payments for their families.
Anti-suicide nets were put up around the dormitory buildings on the advice of psychologists.
via Mail Online.
I suppose that, from the standpoint of management, things could be worse. The Chinese workers could be attempting to form labor unions.
Click on You are NOT allowed to commit suicide for the complete Daily Mail article.
Click on Some thoughts on Foxconn and the Honda strike for analysis of conditions by Lan Yang of the China Study Group.
Click on Workers as Machines: Military Management in Foxconn for the summary of a report of Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior.
Click on Foxconn wiki and Foxconn suicides wiki for Wikipedia reports on Foxconn.
[1/15/2012] Foxconn workers are still threatening suicide over their terrible working conditions, and Apple, Microsoft and other big U.S. companies who contract with Foxconn have no problem with that.
As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn.
300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times. It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things.
Instead of the raise they requested, these workers were given the following ultimatum: quit with compensation, or keep their jobs with no pay increase. Most quit and never got the money. That’s when the mass suicide threat came in. The incident actually caused a factory wide shutdown, reports Record China.
Click on Foxconn Is Still a Hard Place to Work for the full story. Apparently the protestors were persuaded to back down from their suicide threat by the mayor of Shenzen.
Tags: Apple Computer, Apple iPads, Apple iPhones, Apple supplier, China, Chinese worker suicides, Chinese working conditions, Work
Phil Ebersole's Blog 
May 11, 2011 at 9:15 am |
[…] Foxconn, headquartered in Taiwan, is reported by Wikipedia to be the world’s largest manufacturer of electronic components, and the largest private employer in China. It employs an estimated 1 million Chinese workers, including 300,000 to 450,000 at its walled factory complex in Shenzen province. It is a subcontractor for Apple, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Microsoft, Japan’s Nintendo and Sony, Korea’s Samsung and Finland’s N … Read More […]
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