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."

Comments

Everything old is new again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Slavery? Nah. Wage slavery! It's new, you'll like it. Or else.

Re:Everything old is new again.

[ShanghaiBill]

Slavery? Nah. Wage slavery! It's new, you'll like it. Or else.

Except that it is not new. Since the 1950s, students in China have been required to work in factories, farms, or military service. It is not supposed to be an "internship" related to their work, but rather normal work to give them an appreciation of the proletariat/peasant/soldier. They are treated the same, and paid the same, as the other workers. Building PS4s is probably an easier assignment than 99% of the students get, so they should stop whining, and get the job done. If they don't like it, I am sure some students assigned to mosquito infested rice paddies would be happy to swap with them.

These students are going to be the future leaders, in both business and politics. It is reasonable to require them to have an appreciation for the people they will be leading.

My wife is Chinese, and during college she spent six months working in a car factory in Tianjin, installing door handles. She remembers it as a mostly positive experience.

Re:Everything old is new again.

[h4rr4r]

Honestly not a bad system even if all they learn is why they should continue their education. My family did not require my economic contribution when I was a child but from the age of 15 I held various jobs for spending money, car insurance and most importantly to my parents so I could see what sort of someone without much education would be likely to get. Once you have spent a summer of 8-12 hour days washing dishes you know you would like to do more with your life.

Don't count on tasks relevant to your skillset

[Stolpskott]

In most of the companies where I have worked, the interns were judged to be incapable of direct involvement in frontline work, whether that was coding, sales, process-based QA, support or technical documentation.
I did show on a couple of occasions that they could be useful in the QA, support and documentation roles on a limited basis, and when that was not possible, I always dragged my interns off to any meetings I was attending, and talked for what felt like the whole day about what I was doing, but mostly about "why" and "how" - by the time they got out of an internship and finished their education, the chances of them using the same tools as me was minimal anyway, so the processes and reasoning were more useful anyway.
Just about every other engineer and manager used their interns as coffee boys/girls or errand runners.
I cannot say that my interns were happier or felt more fulfilled than any of the others, but they were the ones who wanted to come back a second time, and I am pretty sure they learned a lot more (although one or two of our interns actually made coffee for the first time ever when they were with us).
The whole point of this self-patting-on-back is to say that interns rarely get tasks relevant to their skillset or needs. In this case, it seems like a bit of Chinese pragmatism, using the free resources they have available to maximise profit.