Foxconn: Students Told to Man Production Lines If They Want to Graduate
April 2nd, 2012Via: Guardian:
Apple’s factories in China are employing tens of thousands of students, some of them on forced internships, according to campaigners lobbying for better labour conditions at Foxconn plants, which assemble iPhones. Some students could be as young as 16.
The Foxconn chairman, Terry Gou, head of China’s largest private-sector employer – with 1.2 million workers – promised on Sunday to reduce hours and improve pay after an independent audit found multiple labour law violations at his factories.
But campaigners have accused Apple, Foxconn and the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a charitable organisation that carried out the audit published on Friday, of ignoring the issue of forced internships, where students are told they will not graduate unless they spend months working on production lines during holidays.
In December, 1,500 students were sent by just one vocational college in Henan, China’s most populous province, for internships at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant, which Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, visited last week. The Yancheng Evening News, which exposed the practice, interviewed students who said they were going against their will and that their schools were acting as “labour agencies”.
“The gross violation of forced internship was not addressed at all,” said Debby Cheng, project officer of Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom), of the Foxconn audit. “They tried to water down the problem.”
Students of nursing, languages, music and art are being corralled into internships of between three and six months, during which 10-hour days and seven-day weeks are not unusual, according to Sacom and a number of Chinese media reports, which claim colleges and universities are acting as employment agencies, sending their pupils to Foxconn not for relevant training, but to bolster the workforce during summer and winter holiday periods.
In the summer of 2010, when Foxconn was in crisis after several suicides among the workforce at its largest plant in Shenzhen, 100,000 vocational school students – mostly in their late teens – were sent from Henan for three months.
China Daily reported that some students at a vocational school in Henan’s capital, Zhengzhou, were not told of the work until nine days before they were due to leave home. Teachers told students they must leave “as ordered by the provincial government” and that all those who refused would have to drop out of school.
I don’t know about you, but I was “corralled” into working at my family business at the age of 13. I think I made 2.50 per hour working weekends and the summer months and then was “forced” by my parents to put all my money into a savings account for college. I don’t know what students in China pay for their schooling, no clue. This just doesn’t sound harsh to me. I just had to mostly pay and work as I went through my schooling. Worked full time while completing my undergraduate degree.
I was “fortunate” enough to use up my pension to pay for graduate school and also had work study duties to perform. I don’t think I ever got a free ride.
Sorry, I don’t know what China requires re their students re payment for their education. Cripe, I can’t even believe the Chinese are giving their children an opportunity for education. But I don’t pity them for having to work for it. I don’t.
Been there, done that.