Foxconn has continually been a controversial company in China; we have read about it first in stories like “Beijing Foxconn Workers on Strike over Unpaid Bonuses” and then later in stories like “Two Suicides Over Four Days at Foxconn in Zhengzhou”. Now, the current controversy that Foxconn is swept up in concerns the subject of “student labor”.

The Northern Engineering Information Center for Xi’an Technical University has forced and arranged for university students to go work at Foxconn as interns. Students unwilling to participate as interns are not issued a diploma upon graduation.

Wang Yiran is a second-year student at the university, and is just one of the thousands of students that have seen the “smokestacks” by working as an intern at Foxconn. She says that the students sent to Foxconn involve at least first- and second-year students. While this was the case last year as well, university students are only officially sent to Foxconn as fourth-year students as part of their “mandatory training”. If this internship cannot be completed by students that school year, it must be completed the following year. However, this intern work does not necessarily match their university specialization.

Wang describes her daily routine as an intern at Foxconn: as part of her morning shift, Wang starts work every day at 7:30 AM, then has half an hour to eat breakfast from 11:00-11:30, and finally finishes work at 16:30. Then, she does overtime that lasts until 19:30 for a total of 11 hours a day of work in which she is allowed a 10 minute break in the morning and in the afternoon.

Wang stands for almost 11 hours a day in the assembly line every day. Many times she and her classmates have wanted to not take part, but the school has answered their request by saying that the regulations for the period of internship state that it is to last until October 10, and that any persons who prematurely bow out of the process will have “6 technical course credits” revoked, and so will not be eligible for a graduation diploma. And so from October 1 until October 10, 246 university students worked on the assembly line in which four students fainted and another two students were sent to the hospital.

Why has Foxconn been cooperating with a university in order to start using student labor? The reasons are because it has become more difficult to recruit workers for Foxconn and that there are very few entry level workers; as well, controversies that erupt involving suicide attempts are often exposed in the media and thus lowering the reputation of this company. At present, the main method by which Foxconn recruits new workers into its factory is through recommendations through its staff to fellow family members and friends.

Source: People’s Daily Online

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Keywords: interns university students Foxconn