“Apple’s main supplier in Asia has been employing students illegally working overtime to assemble the iPhone X, as it struggles to catch up with demand after production delays,” Yuan Yang reports for the Financial Times. “Six high school students told the Financial Times they routinely work 11-hour days assembling the iPhone X at a factory in Zhengzhou, China, which constitutes illegal overtime for student interns under Chinese law.”
“The students, aged 17 to 19, said they were told that a three-month stint at the factory was required “work experience” that they had to complete in order to graduate,” Yang reports. “‘We are being forced by our school to work here,’ said Ms Yang, an 18-year-old student training to be a train attendant who declined to use her first name for fear of punishment. ‘The work has nothing to do with our studies.’ She said she assembled up to 1,200 iPhone X cameras a day.”
“Apple said an audit has turned up ‘instances of student interns working overtime at a supplier facility in China,’ adding ‘we’ve confirmed the students worked voluntarily, were compensated and provided benefits, but they should not have been allowed to work overtime,'” Yang reports. “Foxconn said that ‘all work was voluntary and compensated appropriately, [but] the interns did work overtime in violation of our policy’ prohibiting student interns working more than 40 hours a week.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Perhaps what you’ve learned during your internship is that you do not ever want to work on an assembly line?
As we wrote back in June 2016, You want the types of high-paying jobs that Apple has already proven to have created in droves.
The ultimate goal is what Steve Jobs always wanted all along: Automated assembly via robotics.
They don’t sleep, they don’t strike or make demands, they don’t jump off buildings or die in dust fires, most of them don’t even need the lights on. They just make what you program them to make, the same way every time, with quality control that no human line can ever match.
“I’m as proud of the factory as I am of the computer.” – Steve Jobs, February 1990
Wow that headline is misleading. Context is everything in these stories, and I know sensational headlines sell the story, but maybe be a little less punchy? Damn.
Perhaps a labor shortage at Foxcon explains the HomePod delay; all hands on deck for the X… switch to producing HomePods later.
Let me fix that story for ya.
“Chinese factories reportedly force overtime to gear up for all the electronics being purchased for Christmas.”