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Foxconn Accused of Forcing InternsTo Build PS4s Or Lose School Credit
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from a short article at Geek.com, based on this Chinese newspaper report (Google translation) that thousands of students have been (figuratively) press-ganged into assembling PlayStation 4 consoles, ahead of the PS4's November launch. From the article: "The students involved were offered internships at the company while studying an IT engineering course. But those that accepted aren't being assigned work that matches their course or skill set. Instead, they are being put on the production lines. The reason it is being called a forced internship is because if any of the students refuse to do the work they are assigned, six credits will be deducted from their course total. Without those six credits it's thought to be impossible to pass, meaning the students have to do the work or risk losing their qualification."
If they want to pay these kids as well as give them a grade that would be fine.
The students are paid the same as other assembly line workers. The English article says they are not paid, but that is wrong. The original article, in Chinese, explicitly says that they are paid (yes, I can read Chinese). I am also somewhat familiar with these internships. I lived in Shanghai for several years, and my company had an electronics assembly plant in Pudong. We had some interns there, and I wanted to use some of the engineering undergrads to do actual engineering rather than assembly line work. But I found out that was against the rules. They had to do "proletariat" work on the assembly line, not desk work. They were paid the same as other assembly workers, and were treated the same in every way.