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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."
Slavery? Nah. Wage slavery! It's new, you'll like it. Or else.
Why does China get the job done?
- They understand their priorities when the world wants the latest gadgets
- Cheap labor
- Small kiddy fingers == smaller gadgets
- Lost of cheap labor
- Factories run at 24/7 which means a more efficient use of factory resources
- No workers's union which could jeopardize deadlines.
Currently China is a booming economy (partially because they have lots of cheap labor). Maybe The West has become too elitist in A) Gadget demands and B) Worker rights. Our demand is there, China is just for filling our wishes.
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.
Sadly, most executives are going to say "are we still profitable? Awesome" and not give a damn.
Making the equipment in the US will likely cost more, cut down on profits, and therefore reduce executive bonuses.
The current mentality says "cheap as possible and cut as many jobs as you can". I don't see that changing any time soon.
Most executives are worth their weight in warm spit, and that's the problem.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I came here to say exactly this. I am a mechanical engineer and the company that I did my internship (where I am currently employed full time) put me on the floor running production more than once. I gained very valuable expertise doing this and coincidentally, if I had refused the company would have, and rightfully so, fired me. If they had fired me, I wouldn't have received the 9 credits that I got for my internship which were also necessary for me to graduate. There is nothing wrong with that. I didn't feel as though I was being taken advantage of and at the end of the day production work had better be in every engineer's skill set. Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of product design that works on paper and turns out to be shit in the real world.
Common Sense (+1)
These accusations of coercion are blatantly defamatory. We are simply offering incentives, which the interns, as free and rational agents, are choosing to accept or decline. It's practically a libertarian utopia, trade among men, as equals, free from the dead hand of state power. Anyone who says otherwise is probably some sort of commie, who thinks that labor and capital negotiate from positions of unequal strength or some bullshit like that.
It's kind of a relief to know that pretty soon China's economic model will evaporate once 3d printing becomes consumerized.
At least, the part where cheap labor is mercilessly exploited in an inhuman fashion by lazy, worthless douchebags.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
This whole "intern" experience annoys the hell out of me. I had the unfortunate pleasure of being a coffee runner / bottom b!tch while I was in school too. If you're going to intern the companies need to pay them a minimum wage or whatever the going rate is for entry level people. Yes I know this is China, but even in the US a few years ago the whole intern thing was a complete excuse to slave labor college students.
My internship was a complete joke and a waste of my time. I know a few kids who were lucky, but the majority never had any "connections" to use when they left the internship and post college. Get a real part time job locally or in my case work at the on campus IT department which coincidentally helped me land my real first job with a salary and benefits.
Onto the topic at hand, when I buy products made in a third world country, I know for a fact somewhere along the line little starving children made it for pennies so I can buy it at a 300% markup. That's the whole point of globalization, to exploit a lesser countries cheaper labor and resources so we can upcharge local americans and pocket the markup. I don't understand the outrage people have. You're knowingly buying a product made from a country that doesn't care about its environment and people. That is why it is super cheap!
There is a reason there aren't any "free trade Xboxes" or "100% Fair Pay iPhones". If you don't like third world countries abusing their people and environment for your shiny new toy then don't buy it and live like it is 1994 without any real technology or keep using tech that was built from fabrication plants that were in the US.
China is socialist and not capitalist? Have you been asleep for the last few decades? Or do you also believe that the Democratic Republic of North Korea is actually democratic, and that the United States of America is actually united?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I agreed to be a "web intern" for the local newspaper one semester. I thought I'd be helping to design layouts or code bits. No, it turned out all I did was copy news stories from Quark and paste them into HTML, and modify/crop the newsprint images for the web. It was tedious, it was boring, and all I learned was that there really REALLY needed to be a pure HTML export feature in Quark and there wasn't one. It sucked.
But hey, I got free web experience and a line on my resume, right?
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Unless people are willing to boycott Sony and not buy a PS4 over this kind of thing, they have no incentive to stop.
Why boycott Sony? When you can boycott Foxconn products like the iPhone and Xbox. Sony have their own manufacturing plants. Where do you think the UK made rasberry Pi is made? Sony's Pencoed factory. I suspect that Foxconn will not be making the PS4 long term, but have used Foxconn to deal with its initial demand, their are very few companies who could have taken on this contract.
Hold on for a second here, people. Let's remember for just one second... These students... they chose (ok - an assumption on my part - they presumably chose) to intern at Foxconn. FOXCONN. Putting physical devices together is what they DO. That's their entire POINT in the universe. What are these kids thinking, that they'd be working on advanced logistics and supply chain management right out of the gate? There are two kinds of jobs in a contract manufacturer. Ones you can train for over a week, and ones you can train for over a year (or more). Not a whole heck of a lot in between. On some level you gotta ask -- what did these kids expect? If you don't want to learn (by doing) some assembly, then you're really looking for an internship somewhere else.
But how can this be tied back to Apple? Isn't everything bad that Foxconn does Apple's fault? I'm sure Apple is responsible for this somehow if we dig hard enough!
Like "300 workers at Apple factory threaten suicide" (because they were in danger of losing their jobs when Microsoft Xbox production dropped). Another one was an article about employees complaining mostly about overtime - when they actually complained that they couldn't always get as much overtime as they wanted.
I have to agree. There is a finite amount of time they are forced to do that particular task and then they move on in life. It kind of messes up my business plan to stand in the parking lot selling "I was a slave at Foxconn and all I got was this stupid tee shirt" shirts to graduating interns...
"I was an indentured servant at Foxconn and all I got was this stupid tee shirt" just does not have the same humorous impact.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office