The manufacturing partner of Apple, Foxconn Technology, is now facing claims that vocational students were compelled to work at plants that make the iPhone and its components. The company has said that it uses ‘interns’ on manufacturing lines but claims those students are allowed to leave whenever they choose. Students have said that they were forced to make iPhones at a Foxconn factory located in Zhengzhou, China.

“They said they are forced to work by the teachers,” Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch, said. Staff members of China Labor Watch said that students claim 10 out of 87 workers for iPhone assembly lines were students. “They don’t want to work there — they want to learn,” Qiang said. “But if they don’t work, they are told they will not graduate, because it is a very busy time with the new iPhone coming, and Foxconn does not have enough workers without the students.”

Foxconn said that students comprise 2.7 percent of its 1.2 million workforce in China, according to a statement. That accounts for 32,000 workers. The statement also said that the schools “recruit the students under the supervision of the local government, and the schools also assign teachers to accompany and monitor the students throughout their internship.”

The Fair Labor Association, hired by Apple to audit Foxconn, said that Foxconn was making progress in cutting hours and improving work conditions for workers. “I am concerned about these recent reports, and we’re following up,” Auret van Heerden, the president and chief executive of the Fair Labor Association, said. “If there have been any breakdowns in policies, we expect changes to be made.”

Advocates for employees at Foxconn said that the company is under pressure to fill huge orders as quickly as possible.

“When students enroll in vocational schools, they should receive a genuine education,” Debby Chan Sze Wan said. Wan is a member of Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior. “Standing in a factory, doing the same motion for 10 hours a day, this is not an education. And they are told they cannot leave, that they must work or they will be dismissed from school.”

According to articles in the Chinese press, schools were closed in Huai’an so the students could work in the Foxconn plants, some working 12 hours per day. Officials from Huai’an released a statement that said higher education institutions have to follow policies.

“The university told us it’s a good way to experience corporate culture,” a student told one Chinese newspaper. “Even though many of my classmates are reluctant to go to Foxconn, our teachers still asked us to work there starting in August.”

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Suicide has become more than the desperate release of a nearly enslaved factory worker, there at Foxconn. It has also become a bargaining chip. 200 workers posed ready to jump to win a dispute over promised compensation. At the beginning of 2012, 150 employees made a similar threat on the roof of a factory regarding working conditions. And earlier this June, 1,000 workers rioted in that same plant upon a dispute in a company restaurant.

Some of the measures Foxconn has adapted to answer the suicide-inspiring work environment — which lead 18 workers to jump from the top of the factory, 14 of which he died — include installing safety nets. This seems to be a case of curing the symptom and not the problem. They have also hired counselors to work with the employees.

If this is the cost of getting our iPhones a little cheaper, we have to ask ourselves: is it worth it?

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Bill Weir of Nightline was granted access to Foxconn, one of the Chinese suppliers for the tech giant Apple. The reason for the unprecedented access is because Apple had been receiving scrutiny for weeks regarding how the workers at the company are treated. The company employs over 1 million, making it one of the largest companies on China’s mainland. The company provides parts for not only Apple but also Dell, Intel and Nintendo.

Weir toured the Foxconn location in Shenzhen, being taken aback by the lives of the employees at the plant, which totals 235,000 employees.

The majority of the employees at the plant are teenagers, with Weir saying that almost no one looked to be over the age of 30. They work 12-hour shifts putting together technology gadgets and come from small villages within the country. Many of the employees work and live at Foxconn, which has dorms much like a college campus, as the employees have to pay $17.50 per month for room and board. There are seven people living in one room. Forbes has released data that shows Foxconn employees make around $1.78 per hour.

Weir noted that the majority of the workers had the same complaints that workers in other countries have. Those complaints include they are too tired, the price for food is too high, and the their pay is too low. One employee, who is a mother of two, said the following when working:

“A lot of the time I think about how tired I am. I think about resting.”

If you work at Foxconn you will be working at a place like no other. The reason for this is because when approaching the outside of the building you can see suicide prevention nets. The suicide nets had to be installed in between buildings following a mass suicide threat from a large number of workers back in 2010. Tim Cook, now the CEO and then the COO of Apple, went to Shenzhen to examine the problem with a team of experts. The experts told Cook that putting up the nets would be best. Since 2010, 18 employees for Foxconn have committed suicide, which is a number that falls below the national average in China.

The President of the Fair Labor Association, Auret van Heerdenan, spoke with Weir about audits requested by Apple of the working conditions at its factories across the country. Van Heerdenan looks for signs from the workers when performing an audit of a factory. Those signs include interest from the workers and liveliness when he walks by them at the factory. The results of the audits are supposed to be released sometime in the month of March, according to the Fair Labor Association.

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Apple Inc. made it clear in a published statement that the FLA would be interviewing thousands of workers and “will inspect manufacturing areas, dormitories and other facilities, and will conduct an extensive review of documents related to procedures at all stages of employment.”

Foxconn facilities in the Chinese cities of Chengdu and Shenzhen are first in line for the investigation, and after that facilities of other suppliers like Quanta and Pegatron may also be audited.

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple stated, “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.”

Apple also announced that its “suppliers have pledged full cooperation with the FLA.”

The request for an investigation by the FLA seems to be in response to the recent spate of reports on unsafe and horrific working conditions at the huge facilities in China owned by Foxconn.

As reported by the Associated Press, there were so many suicides in Foxconn’s Shenzen plant in 2010 that plant managers had to install nets to prevent workers from killing themselves and escaping from their predicament of keeping on assembling iPhones and iPads under hellish conditions.

The situation was recently highlighted in a January episode of This American Life, a popular radio program hosted by Ira Glass. The report found support in later reports by The New York Times and the CNN.

Foxconn has severely disputed all allegations. Foxconn is also one of the biggest assembly suppliers of Microsoft, Dell and Hewlett-Packard.

The power of the internet in facing big business is proved once again as Apple takes appeasement tactics following a petition on Change.org that asked Apple to “Protect Workers making iPhones in Chinese Factories,” backed by 200,000 signatures. SumOfUs.org sent another petition to Apple backed by over 60,000 signatures asking Apple to oversee that the “iPhone 5” followed ethical manufacture.

The post Assembly Suppliers of Apple Inc. To Be Audited By FLA first appeared on JDJournal Blog.

Roughly 300 workers in China who manufacture Xbox consoles moved to a factory roof and threatened their bosses with mass suicide over a dispute about their pay.

The workers are employed at Foxconn Technology Park in Wuhan in the Hubei province. Foxconn is an independent, global manufacturing partner to companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Sony.

The incident is being investigated by Microsoft.

The reports have not been verified yet but multiple sources out of China have been reporting that 300 workers went to a roof of a Taiwanese-owned factory on the second of January to protest their wages.

Neither Foxconn nor Microsoft have confirmed the reports of the incident yet.

When the employees asked their bosses for a raise, they were told to either keep their jobs with the usual salary or to quit with compensation. The majority of the workers decided it would be best to leave but then the company did not hand over the compensation as it had promised.

Allegedly, the workers were dissuaded from committing suicide one day later by the mayor of Wuhan.

Factories owned by Foxconn in China have been the spot for quite a few worker suicides in the past couple of years. There were 14 suicides in 2010 at the Shenzhen plant following complaints of poor conditions and low pay.

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