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Foxconn Says Vocational Students Aren't Being 'Forced' To Work
jones_supa writes "Foxconn has responded to the criticism regarding Chinese internship students being forced to work for them. In a statement to Washington Post, Foxconn said that its 'short-term internship program' is in line with Chinese labor laws and that interns comprise 2.7% of its labor force in China. Schools, not Foxconn, recruit students into the programs, the company said, and the programs are supervised by local government authorities and teachers assigned to monitor the students' work. Foxconn has also set up a hotline for interns and outlined procedures that allow them to resign from the program."
Related, an anonymous reader pointed at an undercover report on working conditions at Foxconn.
40 years ago the super-major purchases that an affluent family might make in China, would be a bicycle, a radio, and a desk.
Today (thanks to assembly shops like Foxconn) the standard of living has been raised so that those lucky enough to get employment at a place like Foxconn, can often buy a car, a computer, and a TV.
Every major city in China is building hundreds (and I'm not kidding, HUNDREDS, it is astonishing) of skyscrapers on its edges to accomodate rural, farm poor folks who are moving to the city to get jobs at place like Foxconn.
That doesn't mean that everything is always on the level or that Foxconn is pure at heart. Far from it, corruption is widespread and so many of the jobs are incredibly dangerous. But construction work is far and away the most dangerous work environment in China today.
Pay above-suicide wages, provide decent work environment and career path maybe?
You are quite frankly talking out of your arse. Suicides at Foxconn have surely been reported widely, however if you look at the actual statistics, the suicide rate at Foxconn is about three times lower than the suicide rate in the USA, and about equal to the rate of retail employees in the USA that are _murdered_ while they are doing their job.
The USA has a high suicide rates especially among males because of the wide availability of guns - the rate of attempted suicides is not especially high, but the availability of guns means that more suicide attempts are "successful". Something similar happened at Foxconn: It turns out that jumping off a high building produces a good chance of making suicide attempts "successful". And Foxconn _took action_ against that saving the lives of some people who had problems with their girl friends, mental problems, any of hundreds of possible reasons to commit suicide. What is especially commendable is that they did this even though they must have fully known that the idiots would take whatever they did and hold it against Foxconn.