14 DAY TRIAL // The Mail on Sunday on story about iPods being manufactured in sweatshop conditions has been heavily criticized over the past few days.
According to the report, one factory at Longhua employed 200,000 workers, each of whom had to work 15 hours a day for a monthly pay of US$50. The paper said the workers lived in rooms which housed 100 people each.
"I'm no fan of big corporations bullying workers. But I am also no friend to shoddy, sensationalist journalism. This article smacks of hyperbolic journalism in an almost 'laowai/nongmin jin cheng' sort of way," Perry Wu reports for ChinaTechNews. "Workers live in dormitories? Good for them. I've worked in the offices of Chinese companies that also give white-collar workers dormitories--and they provide showers," Wu writes. "And the workers toil in 'a five-storey factory that is secured by police officers'? Is that to keep the workers inside or the hoi polloi outside? Maybe they are police officers, but chances are good the journalist made a common 'laowai' mistake and assumed that the 'bao'an,' or rent-a-cop security officers, were instead 'jingcha,' or official police."
Beside Apple responding to the report, now, Hon Hai Precision Industry, of whom Foxconn is a registered trade name, has sternly denied it.Edmund Ding, spokesman for Foxconn has said that there are huge discrepancies between the truth and the report, which he said seems like a vicious attack on the company.
Ding pointed out that, excluding the people working in its handset making Foxconn International Holdings, Foxconn has a workforce of only about 160,000 employees worldwide. As such, there is no way that the numbers reported could be accurate. Furthermore, as Foxconn is an international company, it abides by the employment law in China which stipulates the minimum wage for a worker in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone is 810 yuan (US$101) a month. As further proof of their adherence to laws, Ding pointed out that Foxconn has been named by the local Shenzhen government as a role model among Taiwan-based investors in the southern Chinese city.