Factory workers at Foxconn stepped off the assembly line today and crammed into a stadium for a pep rally to boost morale following 12 worker suicides this year.
AP reports that some 20,000 of these workers at the factory complex where Apple, Dell, Hewlett Packard and Sony produce must-have electronic gadgets for the international market sported fanciful costumes, waved pompoms and shouted pro-company slogans.
The stadium is part of the complex in Shenzen where sleeping quarters, restaurants, hospitals, supermarkets and swimming pools are packed into 2.3 square kilometers (about 0.9 square miles) and roughly 300,000 workers live.
“For a long period of time I think we were kind of blinded by our success,” Louis Woo, special assistant to Terry Gou, the founder of Foxconn’s parent company, told AP. “We were kind of caught by surprise.”
The company currently employs over 900,000 workers in 16 factories in China and expects that number to mushroom to 1.3 million workers in 2011.
Morale boosting rallies are a regular part of life at the Foxconn factories where Woo admits many workers clock in 80 hours of overtime a week but the company hopes to reduce that to 36 hours a month, in line with China’s labor laws. Foxconn also recently raised wages for workers by about 20 percent to stem the tide of criticism after the worker suicides.
Not surprisingly, critics say that a little bit of stadium cheer won’t stop the suicides.
“I don’t think today’s event is going to achieve anything except provide a bit of theater,” said Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a labor rights group based in Hong Kong. “Basically what Foxconn needs to do is treat its workers like decent human beings and pay them a decent wage. It’s not rocket science.”
Via AP
