Foxconn again faces labor issue on Apple iPhones

“As Apple prepares to unveil the latest iPhone this week, the company’s manufacturing partner in China, Foxconn Technology, is coming under renewed criticism over labor practices after reports that vocational students were being compelled to work at plants making iPhones and their components,” David Barboza and Charles Duhigg report for The New York Times.

“Foxconn has acknowledged using student “interns” on manufacturing lines, but says they are free to leave at any time,” Barboza and Duhigg report. “But two worker advocacy groups said Monday that they had spoken with students who said they had been forced by their teachers to assemble iPhones at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, in north-central China.”

Barboza and Duhigg report, “Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: The New York Times is slipping. They forgot mention worker suicides even once.

Related article:
Report claims thousands of Chinese students forced to work on Apple’s new iPhone 5 – September 6, 2012

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