Foxconn workers put Chinese labor conditions under the spotlight

One of the main factories building Apple products is accused of violating numerous worker protection standards in a new report from the BBC, which sent several undercover reporters to work at the plant. The BBC found that the factory, Pegatron in Shanghai, exhausted its workers with long shifts, didn’t allow them to take time off, gave them cramped dorms to live in, and did not pay them for their time attending mandatory meetings. Apple is said to strongly disagree with the BBC’s findings. It says that the dorm issue has been resolved and that suppliers are required to pay their employees for meetings.

“We are aware of no other company doing as much as Apple to ensure fair and safe working conditions,” Apple tells the BBC. “We work with suppliers to address shortfalls, and we see continuous and significant improvement, but we know our work is never done.”

Apple is once again facing criticism for the labor practices of its overseas suppliers, forcing the iPhone maker to defend its policy on worker rights. In a report published Monday, New York-based China Labor Watch (CLW) accuses Pegatron Group — a Taiwan-based Apple supplier — of committing labor abuses at three of its factories. According to CLW, Pegatron factory operators have been committing several safety and environmental violations over the past five months, withholding pay and forcing employees to work long hours in unhealthy conditions. All told, CLW’s undercover investigation revealed at least 86 labor rights violations, including some that violate Chinese law.

“Our investigations have shown that labor conditions at Pegatron factories are even worse than those at Foxconn factories,” CLW executive director Li Qiang said in a statement. “Apple has not lived up to its own standards.”

It’s hard work assembling iPhone components at Foxconn all day long, so when the weekend finally comes, workers head off for a night on the town. Bars, roller rinks, dance clubs, and roadside stands surround the Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou, China — all catering to the factory’s employees. The New York Times followed a number of the plant’s workers as they went out to blow off some steam, and found that while the work might be dull, the nightlife is anything but. “Dancing lets me vent my anger and stress,” one employee told the Times while out at a club. “When I’m here, I forget everything else.”

Last month Apple cut ties with one of its Chinese suppliers when an internal audit revealed the supplier was utilizing underage labor — but according to a Chinese consumer watchdog group, some other suppliers still have work to do. As reported by CNET, Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) released a report yesterday that accuses Foxlink, Pegatron, and Wintek of exploitative working conditions following inspections last year.

Calling the suppliers “sweatshops,” the report cites inhumane labor practices — including preventing bathroom breaks and proper rest. 14-hour workdays and unpaid overtime are not uncommon, the report states, with some workers only able to take off between one and two days over a three-month period. The suppliers are also accused of employing students as workers under the guise of internships.

Close to a year after publishing an explosive report alleging dangerous and unfair labor conditions at Foxconn plants in China, the New York Times has followed up — and sees some evidence that things are getting better. According to the new report, a meeting between a “high-ranking” Apple official and Foxconn’s “top executives” has resulted in the Taiwanese manufacturer pledging to increase wages and reduce working hours in reforms set to go into effect next year.

Other changes include improvements to the safety and comfort of Foxconn’s factories, including better chairs for workers and automatic shut-off functions for machinery. Foxconn makes products for virtually all major electronics companies, but after drawing criticism in the past year it seems Apple is eager to spearhead the reforms. An anonymous company executive told the Times that “the days of easy globalization are done. We know that we have to get into the muck now.”

A fight at a Foxconn dormitory this morning escalated into a full-scale brawl between 2,000 people that left 40 injured and the adjoining Taiyuan facility closed. The riot was first reported by Engadget, and it’s still unclear what sparked the disturbance; Foxconn so far has put it down to a “personal dispute” that appears not to have been work-related. However, a factory employee told the New York Times that the violence started when security guards and workers started brawling.

The Taiyuan plant in northern China employs over 79,000 people and makes components for various electronics and car companies, though one worker told Reuters that the iPhone 5 is assembled there. An earlier report by M.I.C Gadget also backs up the iPhone claims. While this incident isn’t the first disturbance at a Foxconn facility, with protests over pay and working conditions becoming a more familiar sight of late, the murky reports from China’s state-controlled media mean it’s too soon to draw any conclusions right now.

A bizarre and troubling story has come from China today. Both The Shanghai Daily and the CNR News radio station have reported that up to several thousand Chinese students were pulled out of school and into Foxconn to “work on the iPhone 5.” There appear to be two separate sources, one of which originated on the social network Sina Weibo. That source claimed that around 200 students from Huaiyin Institute of Technology were driven from their school to the Foxconn factory in Jiangsu in a sort of forced ‘internship’ program. The source, who claimed to be a student at the school, said the work began last Thursday. The student also said they are being paid a rate of 1,550 yuan (about $244) a month for six 12-hour days of work per week. The Shanghai Daily also reports it has corroborated the claims with “several” other students from at least five other colleges. The only Weibo post we can locate by the user, however, is quite vague, so it appears that The Shanghai Daily contacted her for further information.

Foxconn’s internship programs came under some fairly harsh criticism in the Fair Labor Association’s Foxconn Investigation report, with interns found to be working much as employees, with long hours and sometimes lax documentation. The FLA document also specifically prescribed a set of changes that Foxconn should make to bring its internship program into compliance, but The Shanghai Daily reports that some schools had simply dropped the program altogether in the wake of the controversies.

Following its initial investigation of Apple device manufacturer Foxconn back in March, the Fair Labor Association (FLA) has released a follow-up report detailing the company’s progress in improving work conditions. Of the 360 actions required to be completed by July 1st, 2013, FLA representatives claim that Foxconn has completed 284, with most occurring on or ahead of schedule. The tasks ranged from reducing work hours to 60 per week, eliminating payroll discrepancies, and improving facility conditions. Foxconn has also made strides to bolster employee representation through union elections, and is allegedly on track to meet Chinese labor guidelines, which limits work to 40 hours per week with up to 9 hours of overtime. The FLA says that it will continue to work with Foxconn and Apple to ensure that the remaining 76 changes are made before the July 1st deadline.

Marketplace correspondent Rob Schmitz, who gained attention for challenging Mike Daisey’s accounts of working conditions in China, has been granted exclusive access by Apple and Foxconn to record the companies’ iPad production line. The video (below) is a follow-up to last week’s report of life inside Foxconn’s Longhua facility in Shenzhen, which while critical of the company, is far less damning than Daisey’s fictional account.

The video captures a first look at nearly-completed iPads undergoing screen and gyroscope testing, alongside the familiar images of hundreds of applicants waiting in line for a shot at working inside the factory. Schmitz ends the piece noting that Foxconn is locating its newest factories — like its new facility in Zhengzhou — in China’s interior in order to access a greater part of China’s vast labor supply.

Right on cue alongside the Fair Labor Association’s report on Foxconn worker conditions, Apple has announced that both it and the manufacturer will work together to hire “tens of thousands” of new workers in an effort to improve working conditions and “clamp down” on overtime. Foxconn said it is reducing working hours to 49 hours per week, including overtime, and developing a compensation package that keeps workers at their current level. Additional housing and canteens will be built to accomodate the hiring. As Retuers notes, the agreement will likely cause higher prices for consumers — in addition to Apple, Foxconn has manufactured for numerous major companies such as Samsung, Sony, Nintendo, and Motorola Mobility — but the impact won’t be immediate.

The Fair Labor association has just released its anticipated report on its investigation of Apple’s labor conditions at the Foxconn factories in China. The FLA is an independent organization that Apple voluntarily asked to audit its factories after its working conditions came under question and harsh criticism in January, most notably by the now infamous and falsified Mike Daisey episode of This American Life.

The FLA reports that it interviewed 35,000 workers at Foxconn factories in Guanlan, Longhua, and Chengdu. The largest of these, the Guanlan factory, employs 73,000 workers. Of the 35,000 people interviewed, the FLA reports that only 4 percent of them were under the age of 18 (16 is the legal working age in China).

Apple, which has come under increased scrutiny during the past year, says this is a “substantial improvement over previous results,” but will continue to do better. In January, for example, 60-hour work week Code compliance was at 84 percent, while it was at 89 percent in February just one month later. If you’re interested in the human rights controversy surrounding Apple’s supply chain, definitely check out the rest of Apple’s Supplier Responsibility page.

We’ve received an early transcript of the episode of This American Life which will air this evening at 8:00PM ET entitled “Retraction.” The episode features Mike Daisey, whose previous appearance on TAL was a dramatic monologue he has been performing since 2010 about workers at the Chinese factory which produces, among many other things, Apple products. Mike has gained a lot of attention for his work which has in turn brought much attention to the plight of the Chinese workers who toil to produce electronics. However, as this new episode makes clear, not everything Mike Daisey said in his performance was technically or even, in some instances, close to -- the truth.

The transcript of the show reveals more details that Mike Daisey seemingly lied about or misrepresented, forcing This American Life to retract its support for the episode. “Retraction” features host Ira Glass, Mike Daisey, Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, whose further factchecking of the episode after its original airing led to the retraction, and Mike Daisey’s translator, Cathy, who accompanied Mike on his trip to Foxconn.

This American Life has retracted an episode that focused on working conditions inside a Foxconn iPad factory, calling the source material “partially fabricated.” The episode — the most popular in TAL history with nearly a million streams — was partially based on the work of artist Mike Daisey, who apparently lied to fact-checkers about his experiences visiting Foxconn’s facility. Some of the lies were discovered during an interview with Daisey’s Chinese translator, who disputed the facts presented in his show and on the air.

A new episode of This American Life detailing the issues and what happened airs later today, with an MP3 of the broadcast available Sunday. Host Ira Glass is taking full responsibility for the error, saying that he’s “horrified to have let something like this onto public radio.”

The comments confirm that Apple has been working with the FLA in at least a limited capacity for some time. For its part, Apple commented a situation where it appeared a worker might have been working two 12-hour shifts — instead clarifying that the 6,000 iPads Zhou Xiao Ying refers to are deburred in two shorter shifts in a single day. Foxconn’s statement came in regard to the question of whether workers earn enough to even need to pay taxes, the company said that was only true for 25 percent of its workers, while the other 75 percent of workers who have been there long enough to pass beyond a probationary period could earn that much with overtime.

You can see the full episode of Nightline here.

After teasing the story yesterday, Nightline has aired its report from Foxconn’s factories on ABC. In the report, host Bill Weir speaks directly to factory workers as well as their managers. You would think that this “unprecedented” look inside Apple factories would reveal much we didn’t know, but the show was relatively light on information. Weir did extensively survey the places where iPads and iPhones are constructed, spent time interviewing both employees and their families, and talked to FLA president Auret van Heerden, though he uncovered mostly familiar information.

We’ve compiled a list of the most interesting facts in bullet points below, but we’re left feeling like there wasn’t much meat on the bones of the 30-minute report. Perhaps most interesting? Foxconn executive Louis Woo said that he would actually like it if Apple demanded that the company double the pay of factory employees. Your move, Apple.

Apple will allow independent environmental audits of at least two of its suppliers’ manufacturing plants, and they could begin as early as March, reports activist Ma Jun to USA Today. Ma is the founder of the Chinese Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), one of several environmental organizations that has been critical of the companies’ environmental practices. While Apple has performed its own audits of its production facilities since 2007, the new inspections by the Fair Labor Association and now the IPE mark a big change in how the company deals with labor and environmental complaints.

So far the plans only include two as yet unnamed suppliers, but this could be expanded to include more in the future. The decision to allow the inspections follows two reports last year from the IPE and other organizations, one of which accuses over twenty suspected Apple manufacturers of environmental violations. Of these companies, Apple has acknowledged that it works with seven, including Foxconn and Meiko Electronics, a suspected PCB supplier to Apple and repeat offender in the report. On the topic of its own audits, Apple’s Supplier Responsibility Progress Report for 2012 reports that the company sent “globally recognized environmental engineering experts” to audit 14 of its facilities, but found that three had exceeded the limit for hazardous waste production, and three had inconsistent waste transport records, although the company is taking actions to remedy this.

On Tuesday night, ABC will broadcast a special Nightline episode filmed at Foxconn’s facilities in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, exploring the working conditions at the company’s factories. That’s been a hot topic of discussion for a while now, and thanks to assistance from Apple and Foxconn, ABC has secured rare access to the production lines on which iPads and iPhones are made. As a prelude to the full episode on Tuesday, today some of the findings have been disclosed in a piece on the ABC News website.

In speaking to workers from the production line, Bill Weir gathers a pretty bleak picture of the mental state of someone working at Foxconn: the fast pace of work doesn’t allow for much distraction and the one interviewee who does report her mind straying from work says it only moved to the matter of how tired she was. The end result is that “soul-crushing boredom and deep fatigue” have to be overcome on a daily basis, while dorms are unsurprisingly described as cramped and lacking privacy. Overtime opportunities and pay are scarce, resulting in many people coming and going, however Foxconn jobs remain highly sought after. ABC shows masses of people gathered outside Foxconn’s plant, looking to get a job inside.

Auret van Heerden, CEO of the Fair Labor Association, has issued some damning language today directed at Foxconn near the conclusion of an audit of factory conditions that had been requested by Apple several days ago. Without going into detail, van Heerden has told Bloomberg that his team was finding “tons of issues” and that he believes they’re “going to see some very significant announcements in the near future.” That could mean anything, of course — but when an organization devoted to protecting workers’ rights calls out “tons of issues,” it isn’t likely a good sign for the company under the microscope.

Strangely, the comments lie in stark contrast to the impressions van Heerden had initially of Foxconn’s facilities just a couple days ago, in which he said that “the facilities are first-class” and “the physical conditions are way, way above average of the norm.” What exactly transpired between FLA’s inspectors and Foxconn since then is unclear, but the group plans to release a full report in the next few weeks.

Apple CEO Tim Cook is currently speaking at Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, and no time was wasted asking about the working conditions of the company’s suppliers — which has been an especially hot topic as of late. Cook stressed monthly reports that will be available on its website and then discussed specific concerns —underage employment and other “problems endemic to our industry” like excessive overtime. He said that Apple has began to manage working hours at a “very micro basis” and that in January there was 84 percent compliancy.

Speaking to the underage concern, Cook called the practice “abhorrent” and “extremely rare” in its supply chain, adding that its his top priority to eliminate it entirely. “If we find a supplier that intentionally hires underage labor it’s a firing offense,” he said. The Fair Labor Association audit is still reportedly ongoing.

At Apple’s request, the Fair Labor Association (FLA) will begin conducting audits of the company’s assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China. The first inspections began this Monday morning, led by FLA president Auret van Heerden, at the facility known as Foxconn City in Shenzhen. Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement that “we believe that workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment, which is why we’ve asked the FLA to independently assess the performance of our largest suppliers.”

This investigation comes after several weeks of intense scrutiny from the media and public on labor practices at Foxconn; Cook had previously expressed “outrage” over a New York Times report on worker conditions in China and had vowed not to “turn a blind eye to problems in our supply chain.” Of course, this is just the latest round of scrutiny that Foxconn and Apple have come under — the media has been reporting on suicides and other poor working conditions at Foxconn over the last several years, but it’s good to see Apple taking steps to address these issues. The FLA will be turning around a report fairly quickly, with initial findings and recommendations planned for release on its website in early March. Foxconn isn’t the only factory under scrutiny, as well: more inspections will be conducted at Quanta and Pegatron facilities later in the spring. When all is said and done, the FLA will have reviewed more than 90 percent of Apple’s manufacturing facilities — the question now is what will Apple change in response to these reports.

Foxconn, which has come under fire due to allegations of poor working conditions in its factories, may now be the victim of a hacking attack. 9to5Mac is reporting that a group calling itself SwaggSec was behind the alleged compromise, and was able to gain access to Foxconn’s internal networks thanks to an exploit in an unpatched copy of Internet Explorer that was being used by a Foxconn employee. The group made a 6.04MB file available earlier this evening — first on Demonoid, and then on The Pirate Bay — which purported to contain login and password information for Foxconn’s email servers, intranets, and various other company-affiliated sites. Also included was what appears to be an internal invoicing account profile for Apple, complete with bank name and vendor account number, as an example of what could be accessed with the leaked logins. 9to5Mac was able to confirm the login information worked on more than one Foxconn server, though access has since been cut off. It’s as of yet unclear what specific Foxconn facility was targeted in the attack, or if additional information had been compromised as well. The company has yet to issue an official statement on the incident.