Inside Foxconn, manufacturer of Apple’s iPhone, Sony PlayStations, and much more

“On a crushingly hot mid-August day at Foxconn’s Longhua factory campus in Shenzhen—where a dutiful army of 300,000 employees eats, sleeps, and churns out iPhones, Sony PlayStations, and Dell computers—workers indulged in a rare moment of celebration,” Frederik Balfour and Tim Culpan report for Bloomberg Businessweek. “First, there was a parade, an Alice in Wonderland spectacle of floats, blaring vuvuzelas, and workers dressed up as Victorian ladies, geishas, cheerleaders, and Spider-Men. This was followed by a two-hour rally inside a vast sports stadium featuring acrobats, musical performances, fireworks, and life-affirming testimonials punctuated by chants of ‘treasure your life’ and ‘care for each other to build a wonderful future.'”

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“It was hardly a spontaneous outpouring. Rather, it was a joint production of employee unions and management at Hon Hai Precision Industry, the flagship of Foxconn Technology Group, as part of an effort to mend the collective psyche of a Chinese workforce that numbers more than 920,000 across more than 20 mainland factories,” Balfour and Culpan report. “The need to do so became apparent after 11 Foxconn employees committed suicide earlier this year, most of them by leaping from company-owned high-rise dormitories. The publicity-averse Taipei-based company and its 59-year-old founder and chairman, Terry Gou, were thrown into the spotlight, subjected to unfamiliar scrutiny by customers, labor activists, reporters, academics, and the Chinese government.”

Balfour and Culpan report, “The suicides introduced Foxconn to much of the world in the worst terms imaginable—as an industrial monster that treats its workers like machines, leveraging masses of cheap labor, mainly 18-to-25-year-olds from rural areas, to make products like the iPhone at seemingly impossible prices.”

Very extensive full article (more like a small book) -recommended – here.