After a rash of suicides by workers last year, Apple product factory Foxconn in Chengdu, China has allegedly begun requiring workers to sign pledges promising not to commit suicide.
A Center for Research on Multinational Corporations and Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) report shows that conditions at the facility are extremely poor, even after making changes to prevent employees from killing themselves. Over a 16-month period beginning last year, more than a dozen workers killed themselves.
The two groups interviewed workers who told them they are regularly overworked and are given inadequate breaks to eat. The report states that workers work 174 regular hours each month, plus overtime. China's labor laws limit overtime to 36 hours a month, but these workers are working 50 to 100 hours in overtime monthly.
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While workers aren't required to work overtime, in interviews employees said they had to work the extra hours to make a regular salary.
The workers, who assemble iPads, work about 12 hours a day, and said they are harassed into working back-to-back shifts, and are humiliated when they make mistakes. "If they made [a] mistake, they had to write a confession letter and hand it to the supervisor," the report says. "If the mistake is serious, the worker has to read the confession letter in front of his other colleagues."
Louis Woo, a spokesperson for Foxconn, admitted conditions can be rough but said that they "are working to change it."
Apple, which has cut ties with other factories for violating labor laws, has not cut ties with Foxconn after concluding the company had made changes to prevent further suicides. The company lauded Foxconn for their efforts to improve conditions, including hiring psychological counselors, creating a 24-hour care center, and attaching large nets to buildings to catch "impulsive suicides," Apple said in a report.
In the first quarter of 2011, Apple posted a record high of $26.74 billion in revenue. The factory sold 15 million iPads last year, and has already sold almost 5 million this year.
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