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Bleak Foxconn Factory Conditions Exposed by Undercover Intern

by Amar Toor on May 20, 2010 at 12:10 PM

foxconn factory workerIf you ever find yourself frustrated while making photocopies or fetching coffee as a summer intern, take a moment and consider how much worse it could be: you could be an intern at Chinese news site Southern Weekend, where you could be sent on an undercover, month-long assignment in China's suicide-prone Foxconn factory (which is responsible for producing iPhone prototypes).

That's exactly where intern Liu Zhiyi was stationed this April, as part of an undercover assignment to report on what factors may be at work behind the Shenzen factory's eerily high suicide rate. As Engadget reports, the article doesn't focus as much on Foxconn's managerial infrastructure, as it does on the ways in which factory bosses manipulate workers into working endless hours. Because of Shenzhen's miniscule minimum wage, any job that allows employees to earn extra via overtime is automatically perceived as a good position, allowing bosses to squeeze every ounce of work they can out of their workers at minimal cost. As Zhiyi reports, the intern soon realized that the mission "wasn't about finding out what they died for, but rather to learn how they lived."

The portrait that Zhiyi paints is chillingly bleak, pressure-packed and full of stress. If your physical or mental condition begins to suffer, you have virtually no one to confide in, thanks to the hive-mind mentality that pervades the facility. As Zhiyi says, even when workers were "talking about their colleagues' suicide jumps, there was a surprisingly calm reaction, and sometimes even a banter would be made about it, as if they were all outsiders." Before signing up to work, each employee signs a form that waives the 36-hour legal limit on monthly overtime hours, allowing, theoretically, them to gain more. In reality, however, today's Foxconn employees are earning the modern-day equivalent of what a Chinese migrant worker would've earned in the 1980s.

Since the report (full translation here) was published, Foxconn has reportedly set up support lines and counseling classes for its workers. But that's unlikely to mitigate the fundamental culture of employer exploitation and blind employee conformity that's at the root of Foxconn's problems. As long as workers continue to hold on to their aspirations to, as Zhiyi says, "start a business, make money and get rich" -- and as long as they see Foxconn as the only way to realize those dreams -- this vicious cycle will probably churn forward. And Foxconn's coffers will continue to fill up. [From: Engadget and Southern Weekend]

Tags: apple, china, conformity, exploitation, factory, foxconn, iphone, Shenzen, Suicide, top, wages, workers

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