Foxconn says underage workers in China plant set up

10:00 AM China, Foxconn, plant, underage, workers No Comments

Taipei - Foxconn technology group, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, has admitted setting of young people at the age of 14 in a Chinese factory, breach of national law, in a case that internally raises further questions about his student program.

Labour human rights aktivisten in China have accused, Foxconn and other large employers in China student internship as a cheap source of labour for production lines where it is more difficult, reduce young adult workers to paid jobs to win.

Foxconn, the trade name of Taiwan's Hon Hai precision industry, said that it had found that some interns at a plant in Yantai, in the northeast of the province of Shandong work under the age of 16 were legal. He did not say, how many were minors.

"Our investigation has shown that the interns in question, who ranged in age from 14 to 16 in this campus for about three weeks had worked," it was said in a statement on Tuesday.

"This is not only a violation of China's labour law, it is also a violation of policy and immediately measures were taken against Foxconn, again to the trainees their educational institutions concerned."

China's official Xinhua News Agency, citing an unnamed government official of the Yantai said that 56 of the underage interns to their schools would be brought back.

The students had used, after Foxconn of development zone asked, where the factory is located last month solve a defect if they were needed, to a deficit of 19,000 employees make Xinhua added to help.

Apple's largest manufacturer
Foxconn is Apple Inc of's largest production partner and makes products for Dell Inc., Sony Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co among its other clients. It said that non-Apple products make the Yantai plant.

Foxconn has the announcement after reviewing Chinese media reports of underage interns under its China workforce of 1.2 million. He said that it had found no evidence of similar injuries at any of its other plants in China.

Foxconn said that with the local government schools participated it the case of Yantai in the intern program, as far as compatible with labour market policy and his lawyer would work.

"But we recognize that the full responsibility for these violations mounting platform with our company, and we have apologized to each student for our role in this action," said the company.

Foxconn and Apple were forced that improving working conditions in Chinese factories, the world's iPads optimally and iPhones after a series of published suicides in the year 2010 and reports of labour abuses, such as excessive overtime, threw a spotlight on the conditions in the plants.

Last month, a riot at a Foxconn plant broke the in place dormitory for migrant workers, the Assembly of iPhones in the city of Taiyuan, about living conditions inside Foxconn.

Foxconn plans to reduce in response to the control of the current 20 overtime less than nine hours a week.

He defended his intern program on Tuesday, say that they made only 2.7 percent of its workforce in China. Internships could be long-term or short-term, carried out in cooperation with schools and other educational institutions.

The average internship about three and-a-half months lasted, it was said.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

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Foxconn treatment of student interns criticized

11:23 AM criticized, Foxconn, interns, student, treatment No Comments

Bobby Yip / Reuters

Workers are seen inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in the southern Guangdong province, in this file picture taken May 26, 2010.

A highly publicized labor audit of Foxconn, conducted by a nonprofit group at Apple's behest after the tech giant faced public pressure to improve working conditions in its supply chain, revealed much about factory practices and conditions. It failed, however, to adequately address what some watchdog groups call an entrenched pattern in Chinese factories: The poor treatment of student interns. 

"As far as I know, no Western company that uses Chinese labor has explicitly addressed this issue at all," Ross Perlin, author of "Intern Nation," said via email. "They should be taking a stand against the exploitation of student labor."

Investigations by Hong Kong-based groups Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour and the China Labour Bulletin detail an internship system rife with abuses, minimal protections for workers as young as 15 years old, and designed to take advantage of loopholes. These watchdog groups cite instances of compulsory internships with long hours and no days off, often in fields unrelated to what the students are studying. Since the students aren't technically employees, companies aren't held responsible if they suffer on-the-job injuries. 

In one report, the CLB said interns "lack the legal protection guaranteed to those with an employment contract. If interns are injured, forced to work excessively long hours or are cheated out of their pay, they often have no one to turn to. And if they do complain to their school, they run the risk of not getting their diploma."

The pool of student talent available to companies like Foxconn is deep. Nearly half of the Chinese students enrolled in technical schools specialize in manufacturing or information technology; in 2010 alone, 2.6 million graduated from these fields, according to the report. A 2010 SACOM report said, "Some interviewees highlighted that the proportion of student workers was as high as one-third or even a half," at Foxconn's Guanlan factory in southern China. The company disputed the figure and said the highest proportion of interns it ever employed was 15 percent.

Foxconn might be the biggest, but it's by no means the only company that takes advantage of the cheap, plentiful labor students provide. "Along with other forms of forced labor more generally, forced or required internships are common in China," Perlin said. The CLB investigated 42 instances of forced internships involving more than five dozen schools and factories over a three-year span.

Schools that provide the students are motivated to preserve the status quo, since they sometimes earn money from the companies who pay them for delivering cheap labor; the students, on the other hand, may be charged "tuition" for the hours they spend on the factory floor. "Student interns are de facto workers in the factory," SACOM said in an investigation of Wintek, another Apple supplier. Although they worked the same long hours as their adult colleagues, these interns only earned roughly $79 per month. "The remaining part of the salary goes to the schools," SACOM said.

In an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, SACOM called for an end to the use of student labor. This is probably unlikely, as the Fair Labor Association, which conducted the Foxconn audit, included in its report a list of improvements to the existing internship system rather than eliminating it altogether.

The FLA defended its audit and said it is attuned to the plight of interns. "FLA made a special effort to understand and assess the risks facing interns at Foxconn," spokesman Aaron Pickering said via email. He pointed to the proposed reforms, which include steps like making sure internships are relevant to what students are studying, paying interns minimum wage and instituting a 40-hour workweek. 

Meg Roggensack, senior adviser of business and human rights at Human Rights First, said following up is crucial. "It will be very important that they continue to monitor it and make sure the commitments are adhered to," she said.

Pickering said this is already on the agenda. "FLA and local organizations will continue to closely monitor the internship program at Foxconn," he said. 

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