“When Chinese worker Wu Jun heard that her employer, the giant electronics assembly company Foxconn, had given employees landmark concessions her reaction was worry, not elation,” Chris Buckley reports for Reuters.
“Wu, 23, is one of tens of thousands of migrants from the poor countryside who staff the production lines of Foxconn’s plant in Longhua, in southern China, which spits out made-to-order products for Apple Inc. and other multinationals,” Buckley reports. “Foxconn’s concessions, including cutting overtime for its 1.2 million mainland Chinese workers while promising compensation that protects them against losing income, were backed by Apple, which has faced criticism and media scrutiny for worker safety lapses and for using relatively low-paid employees to make high-cost phones, computers and other gadgets.”
Buckley reports, “But at the Foxconn factory gates, many workers seemed unconvinced that their pay wouldn’t be cut along with their hours. For some Chinese factory workers – who make much of their income from long hours of overtime – the idea of less work for the same pay could take getting used to… ‘We are here to work and not to play, so our income is very important,” said Chen Yamei, 25, a Foxconn worker from Hunan who said she had worked at the factory for four years. ‘We have just been told that we can only work a maximum of 36 hours a month of overtime. I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable and that 36 hours would be too little,’ she added. Chen said she now earned a bit over 4,000 yuan a month ($634).”
“‘This is a good company to work for because the working conditions are better than a lot of other small factories,’ said Huang Hai, a 21-year-old man who said he had worked at Foxconn’s factory for about two years. Huang was waiting for a friend lined up outside the recruitment centre for prospective Foxconn employees.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It is to laugh.
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