Foxconn undercover report

I have stated my opinion…to be honest, my prejudices… about Taiwanese companies here and here. Issues involving labor management are of interest to me. Issues involving labor management at companies which manufacture the cool technology toys I love interest me more. So today, as I was reading one of my favorite mainstream technology sites engadget, I came across this article, which was a translation from a post on Southern Weekend (side-point… I see a lot of China business bloggers often read this magazine, so I’m going to use this to study Chinese reading, instead of just reading the Chinese edition of FHM / 男人转). The article is about the observations of an undercover reporter, Mr. Liu Zhiyi, who spent 28 days at a Foxconn factory. I was expecting this article to say a lot of out-of-context things about the life of workers in factories (ie. “my god they live in dormitories with 20 workers to a room!” “their work is so boring!”). There are some (IMHO) stupid assumptions, like the reporter expecting operators to feel that recent suicides at Foxconn would be somehow relevant to them. However,I noticed some interesting things in this article.

[I'm not so good at reading Chinese. So I have read the English translation on Engadget first and then went back to translate from the original the parts I found interesting, just to check. The quotes below are from the Engadget translated version.]

Each employee would sign a “voluntary overtime affidavit,” in order to waive the 36-hour legal limit on your monthly overtime hours. This isn’t a bad thing, though, as many workers think that only factories that offer more overtime are “good factories,” because “without overtime, you can hardly make a living.” [...] Only those with the seniors’ “trust,” with good connections, or those in key positions, can often get to work overtime.

I am about 99% sure that the national labor law does not have a provision allowing for a “voluntary overtime affidavit”. But what this quote implies is that the production supervisor is not only playing “favorites” with workers, but quite likely also requiring that the workers give some overtime-pay kickbacks back to the supervisors in the factory. This happens in many factories in Suzhou and is a frequent source of labor problems.

Every day he’d [older worker named Mr. Wang] climb up two to three-meter tall box stacks to check inventory, and would squeeze into small gaps to check the labels. I asked him why push so hard, but he never answered, until one morning I saw him stopping in front of a pillar, and suddenly shouted “help!”

I have a little suspicion that the reporter added this in there for suspense. Its clear from the Chinese that the worker was climbing on top of boxes. So if this is true, one would think that the EHS officer in the factory needs to be a little more vigilant.