Just two days ago, Apple announced the Fair Labor Association would be looking into conditions at their Foxconn facility, and the preliminary results are already coming in. It appears conditions at Foxconn are far better than at other manufacturing facilities, and while there weren’t any immediate conclusions, the picture is much better than many believed. FLA president Auret van Heerden said:
“The facilities are first-class; the physical conditions are way, way above average of the norm. I was very surprised when I walked onto the floor at Foxconn, how tranquil it is compared with a garment factory. So the problems are not the intensity and burnout and pressure-cooker environment you have in a garment factory. It’s more a function of monotony, of boredom, of alienation perhaps.”
This is only the beginning of a three week process, and there’s still plenty of opportunities for things to go awry. That said, in comparison to many other manufacturing jobs in China — especially the garment industry — Foxconn seems like a step above.
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My question is, are they using the rest of China’s sweat shops to come up with this average? I mean, if your baseline is horrendous, then super crappy is going to always look better. Going by what the workers are complaining about, I would say that the plant owners are still missing their mark by a large margin.
I know that my perspective is skewed by living in America, where a job like that would pay at least 10 an hour and overtime would be voluntary, but working people 60 hours a week for $200 paycheck is obscene to me.