The news feeds will be filled with talk of the iPhone today, and most of it is probably going to be positive. However, the Chinese new agency Shanghai Evening Post has posted a pretty scathing review of the working conditions at Foxconn, and in particular the iPhone 5 production line.
The agency managed to get one of its reporters a job working undercover in a Foxconn factory where the iPhone 5 is being manufactured for Apple. He spent 10 days there and then wrote up the entire experience to demonstrate just how bad it is for the thousands of workers Foxconn employs. The agency has timed the release of that report to coincide with the launch of the iPhone 5 today. Here’s a summary of what he experienced.
Getting a job at Foxconn seems to be a pretty simple task. You turn up at the factory, ignore anyone offering to fast track you to a job for a few Yuan, and prove you are healthy by answering 30 Yes/No questions which sum up your mental health. After that you get to stay in a cockroach-infested dormitory that smells of sweat and foam and where dirty sheets are the norm. It also appears that windows have had bars put over them in an attempt to cut down on suicides.
The contract each worker must sign is minimal. They have to agree to keep everything confidential, and are urged by managers to tick “No” in the sections regarding noise and toxic pollution. The journalist later describes very loud machinery and a strong smell of plastic inside the factory where he worked, making it clear why management was insistent on ticking no on the contract before they start working.
Training is a seven day intensive course (by the end of which he was ill) with the main take away being that you do exactly what you are told and nothing else. There’s also details given of 70 ways you can incur a penalty, but only 13 ways to earn a reward.
There are plenty of facilities around the Foxconn factories including a canteen, gym, post office, library, a street full of shops, and a bathing room, but the journalist reports that they are all in a very poor condition, although mostly free to use. To release stress lots of Foxconn workers apparently gather in the playground at weekends and dance and shout.
It sounds like a depressing situation to be in even before entering the factory, but then things only seem to get worse. The journalist’s one and only task was to mark the back plate of the iPhone 5 using an oil pen. Each plate has to have 4 points marked, and they have to be accurate within 5mm of the target placement. He was repeatedly reprimanded for either marking the points too low or using too much oil.
Accuracy is something that comes with experience, and the journalist had to learn fast. He was expected to do a minimum of 5 back plates every minute. So that’s an accurately placed oil pen mark every 3 seconds, with his shift lasting 10 hours without a break. That’s a minimum of 3,000 back plates per shift.
The work is clearly very stressful and the pay is terrible. The example the journalist gave was two hours of overtime earning him just $4. Another interesting point he makes is the back plate work he was assigned is usually given to female workers as they are seen as more nimble. However, there aren’t enough workers to fill the positions at the factory as they keep resigning.
As well as what are clearly very poor working and living conditions, his account makes it clear labor is still cheaper than automation at Foxconn. The oil pen task could be carried out much more quickly and accurately by a robot, yet Foxconn chooses to employ 48 people working intensively to churn out tens of thousands of these back plates every day. And that’s just one part of the iPhone 5.
Will there be a response to this report from Apple? It’s unlikely to be a public one, but I’m sure it will come up in conversation between the two companies once the iPhone 5 has launched later today.
Read more at M.I.C. Gadget and the Shanghai Evening Post (translated)
Source : geek[dot]com
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