Foxconn says underage
workers used in China plant
Reuters – 10/10/2012
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Foxconn
Technology Group, the world's largest contract electronics maker, has
acknowledged hiring teenagers as young as 14 in a Chinese factory, in breach of
national law, in a case that raises further questions over its student intern
program.
Labor rights activists in
China have accused Foxconn and other big employers in China of using student
interns as a cheap source of labor for production lines where it is more
difficult to attract young adult workers to lower paid jobs.
Foxconn, the trading name
of Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry, said it had found some interns at a
plant in Yantai, in northeastern Shandong province, were under the legal
working age of 16. It did not say how many were underage.
"Our investigation
has shown that the interns in question, who ranged in age from 14 to 16, had
worked in that campus for approximately three weeks," it said in a
statement on Tuesday.
"This is not only a
violation of China's labor law, it is also a violation of Foxconn policy and
immediate steps have been taken to return the interns in question to their
educational institutions."
China's official Xinhua
news agency, citing an unnamed Yantai government official, said that 56
underage interns would be brought back to their schools.
The students had been
employed after Foxconn asked the development zone in which the factory is
located to help solve a labor shortage last month, when they were needed to
make up a shortfall of 19,000 workers, Xinhua added.
Foxconn is Apple Inc's
largest manufacturing partner, and also makes products for Dell Inc, Sony Corp
and Hewlett-Packard Co among its other clients. It said the Yantai plant does
not make Apple products.
Foxconn made the
announcement after investigating Chinese media reports of underage interns
among its China workforce of 1.2 million. It said it had found no evidence of
similar violations at any of its other plants in China.
Foxconn said it would work
with local government to bar the schools involved in the Yantai case from the
intern program unless shown to be compliant with labor law and company policy.
"However, we
recognize that full responsibility for these violations rests with our company
and we have apologized to each of the students for our role in this
action," the firm said.
Foxconn and Apple have
been forced to improve working conditions at Chinese factories that make most
of the world's iPads and iPhones after a series of well-publicized suicides in
2010 and reports of labor abuses, such as excessive overtime, threw a spotlight
on conditions inside the plants.
Last month, a riot broke
out at a Foxconn plant assembling iPhones in the northern city of Taiyuan over
living conditions inside Foxconn's on-site dormitories for migrant workers.
In response to the
scrutiny, Foxconn plans to cut overtime to less than nine hours a week from the
current 20.
It defended its intern
program on Tuesday, saying they made up only 2.7 percent of its workforce in
China. Internships could be long-term or short-term, carried out in cooperation
with vocational schools and other educational institutions.
The average internship
lasted about three-and-a-half months, it said.
(Reporting by Taipei
bureau; Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Writing by Mark
Bendeich; Editing by Ron Popeski)
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