What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found

This is a follow up story to the NYT pieces on working conditions inside of Foxconn, the giant electronics manufacturer in China supplying to the world's largest consumer companies such as Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, Asus, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Intel, I.B.M., Lenovo, Microsoft, Motorola, Netgear, Nintendo, Nokia and Vizio.  We featured two posts on these NYT article [February 8, 2012 In China, Human Rights are Built into an iPad] and [February 3, 2012 How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work].


ABC New Nightline program also did a story on Foxconn following up on working conditions that have caused a high amount of suicides and even fatalities within the manufacturing facilities.  Here is a link to the ABC piece.


What is a new interesting concept with this NYT follow up piece is that the working conditions inside of these manufacturing facilities are actually better than working conditions where Foxconn employees came from which were mostly rural villages consisting of rough farming conditions.  Especially for woman, opportunities are even more limited.  Opportunities in China are not as apparent in the US or other Western cultures.  As I pointed out yesterday in the Sara Blakely post [March 11, 2012 Undercover Billionaire Sara Blakely] one of the greatest aspects of America are the opportunities to both success and fail, and to try again.


Via the NTY piece here

• More tellingly, the broadcast showed 3,000 young Chinese workers lining up at the gates for Foxconn’s Monday morning recruiting session.  Now, these workers know about the 2010 Foxconn suicides. They know that the starting salary is $2 an hour (plus benefits, and no payroll taxes). They know they’ll have 12-hour shifts, with two hourlong breaks. They know that workers sleep in a tiny dorm (six or eight to a room) for $17 a month.
• And yet here they are, lining up to work! Apparently, even those conditions, so abhorrent to us, are actually better than these workers’ alternatives: backbreaking rural farm work that doesn’t prepare them to move up the work force food chain.

• Of course, not all Chinese feel that way. The Times had its article translated into Chinese and published on a Chinese news site. Many comments from Chinese citizens posted to that article were critical of the dangerous working conditions at Foxconn factories. Some said that Apple was ultimately responsible and should be held accountable, the position that labor rights groups take.
• In other words, the lessons of this controversy have more to do with China than with Apple. This is only marginally a technology story — I imagine we could find low-wage, tiring jobs at every factory in China, making everything that China makes. Every toy, every houseware, every garment. You could do a year’s worth of exposés.