Shanghai, China
As Apple prepares to unveil the latest iPhone this week, the company’s manufacturing partner in China, Foxconn Technology, is coming under renewed criticism over labour practices after reports that vocational students were being compelled to work at plants making iPhones and their components.
Foxconn has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over working conditions inside its factories. Foxconn has acknowledged using student “interns” on manufacturing lines, but says they are free to leave at any time.
But two worker advocacy groups said Monday that they had spoken with students who said they had been forced by their teachers to assemble iPhones at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, in north-central China.
Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.
“They said they are forced to work by the teachers,” Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch, one of the advocacy organizations and a frequent critic of Foxconn’s labor policies, said in an interview on Monday. Mr Li said his staff had spoken with multiple workers and students who, as recently as Sunday, said that 10 of 87 workers on an iPhone assembly line were students.
“They don’t want to work there — they want to learn,” said Mr Li. “But if they don’t work, they are told they will not graduate, because it is a very busy time with the new iPhone coming, and Foxconn does not have enough workers without the students.”
Foxconn, in a statement, said that students made up just 2.7 percent of its 1.2 million-person work force in China — about 32,000 workers — and that schools “recruit the students under the supervision of the local government, and the schools also assign teachers to accompany and monitor the students throughout their internship.”
A spokesman for Apple declined to comment on the recent cases, but he said Apple’s code of conduct tells suppliers to follow local labor laws when dealing with interns and other workers.
Foxconn has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over working conditions inside factories that manufacture smartphones, tablet computers and other electronic devices for Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other technology giants.
Investigations by newspapers, outside groups and companies like Apple itself have revealed illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers, improper disposal of hazardous waste and, in some cases, industrial accidents that have killed four people and injured more than 100 at Foxconn and other Chinese factories that supply Apple.
Earlier this year, following highly publicized reports of such problems, Apple asked an outside organization to audit working conditions inside the plants where the bulk of iPhones, iPads and other Apple products are built. In the wake of that audit, Foxconn announced it would significantly raise wages for many of its employees and reduce overtime hours to come into compliance with Chinese law.
In August, the Fair Labor Association — the group hired by Apple to audit Foxconn — said Foxconn had made progress at cutting employees’ hours and improving working conditions, but that those shifts would require Foxconn to recruit “tens of thousands of extra workers.”
The group also said that Foxconn and Apple had adopted policies to make sure that student interns knew they could resign from Foxconn and still graduate, and to link the jobs they performed inside Foxconn with their studies. “I am concerned about these recent reports, and we’re following up,” said Auret van Heerden, president and chief executive of the Fair Labor Association, in an interview.
“If there have been any breakdowns in policies, we expect changes to be made.” Worker advocates say Foxconn is under intense pressure at critical moments — like leading up to the release of a new product, like the iPhone 5 — to fill huge orders quickly (New York Times)
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