Imagine getting eight hours of sleep. Waking up. Sharing a bathroom with seven other people. Getting dressed. Heading to a factory. Getting a full body search (even having your junk handled). Sitting down and working for 14 hours with a few breaks in between. Leaving the plant and repeating that process day in and day out every month for only £230 pounds. Sucks to be a Foxconn worker, eh?
A new detailed report from the UK’s Mirror lays out first-hand accounts of the day-in and day-out life of a Foxconn worker at their plant in Taiyuan, northern China. The same plant, I might add, that is responsible for producing Apple’s highly sought after iPhone 5, a device that retails for a whooping £599 pounds, well outside the range of even being affordable on a month’s salary of a Foxconn worker.
The article details how the workers – who wished to remain anonymous for fear of being fired – go through the daily grind of working to meet near perfect expectations for Apple’s handset. Not too long ago a strike was staged at the Foxconn plant to due to worker unrest after Apple started cracking down on Foxconn when consumers complained about some of the iPhone 5 handsets having scratches and nicks on them. Foxconn denied that a strike had taken place and that production for the iPhone 5 was on par to meeting scheduled estimates.
Each worker is expected to produce a device every 30 seconds and up to 1,000 handsets a day.
Many of the workers actually live out of the Foxconn dormitory, which is said to house about eight workers per room with one toilet.
According to one of the workers, up to 600 employees quit working at Foxconn every day. The company employees more than 79,000 men and women to work for them. More than 13 workers committed suicide due to the stress from working at the plant and the pressure put on them to from the line workers.
Apple recently outsourced additional production work of the iPhone 5 to other Foxconn subsidiary plants so that they can meet the demand for the handset, which is estimated to move around 47 million units before the year is out.
Foxconn also produces devices for other tech-based companies, including Nokia and Huawei Technologies.