Chinese gadget manufacturer Foxconn, best known for making Apple's iDevices, has been in the news quite a bit lately, and none of it has been good. The company has often been accused of providing poor working conditions for its employees including verbal abuse, abysmal pay, and being forced to work far more overtime than is legally allowed. Today, another worker fell off one of Foxconn's buildings, making him the ninth person to die at the company in 2010. The CEO of Foxconn, Guo Tai-Ming, spoke out recently and stated that the company is "definitely not a sweatshop," going on to say that with nearly 900,000 employees around the world, they have a lot to do, but that the situation would be stabilized soon.
There has also been an undercover report done by eight men covering Foxconn and their terrible working conditions. Three of the men ended up being hired by the company and they claimed that new employees must agree to work between 60 and 100 overtime hours per week (the legal limit being 36 hours per week) and are paid minimum wage, which is 900 yuan, approximately $132, per month. The report went on to say that managers are often verbally abusive and deduct pay from bonuses the employees receive. Foxconn is reportedly losing around 50,000 employees per month and so the company is desperate to hire new workers, dropping recruitment standards and requiring only that new employees show identification to get a job. The company has reportedly hired 50 counselors to help deal with the issues they've been having, and front-line managers are trying to communicate with workers to better understand the situation.
