The wave of suicides at the vast plant near Shenzhen owned by Foxconn, the Taiwan contract manufacturer, where 300,000 workers are employed, raises questions about the sustainability of China’s use of migrant workers from rural areas.
The FT was allowed unusual access inside the Foxconn plant in Longhua, which has in the past been kept out of view of reporters, and Kathrin Hille’s video interviews with Foxconn employees, as well as the company’s spokesman, are fascinating.
These, for example, are the thoughts of Lu Pengguo, a logistics worker:
“At work, there’s pressure all the time. Sometimes, it all feels so pointless. Then sometimes I feel really tired, annoyed, that I don’t want to work here anymore. . . . On our production line we do the same thing every day, over and over again, day after day, month after month, year after year. It makes me feel drained.”
Perhaps this feeling of repetition, since many people work at the plant for long periods to save enough to return to their home cities and towns, is a factor in the suicides. Foxconn admits that it is scrambling to understand and to halt the deaths.
As Kathrin points out, the first generation of migrants from rural areas were prepared to put up with a lot to earn money in coastal cities but the younger generation is tiring of the working conditions.
It is not the first time that Foxconn has faced public pressure over the plant, where most Apple iPods and iPhones, as well as electronic goods for Sony and Dell. After a critical story about working conditions in 2006, Apple dispatched a team of inspectors there.
Apple’s audit found that:
The manufacturing facility supports over 200,000 employees (Apple uses less than 15% of that capacity) and has the services you’d expect in a medium city. The campus includes factories, employee housing, banks, a post office, a hospital, supermarkets, and a variety of recreational facilities including soccer fields, a swimming pool, TV lounges and Internet cafes . . .
We found no instances of forced overtime . . . We did, however, find that employees worked longer hours than permitted by our Code of Conduct, which limits normal workweeks to 60 hours and requires at least one day off each week. We . . . found that the weekly limit was exceeded 35 per cent of the time and employees worked more than six consecutive days 25 per cent of the time.
That is an awful lot of work, repeated “month after month, year after year”.
