FLA, Apple, Foxconn secure deal on Chinese workers

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Fair Labor Association is claiming to have secure assurances from Apple and its supplier Foxconn that they will make sweeping changes to workers’ pay and conditions at the latter’s Chinese plants in line with the FLA’s latest report, but critics have argued they don’t go far enough, according to The Register.

As Apple CEO Tim Cook wraps up his eventful trip to the People’s Republic this week, the non-profit released the findings of its initial month-long report into conditions at three Foxconn plants in China, at Guanlan, Longhua, and Chengdu.

It found substantial problems with working conditions including excessive overtime, health and safety risks and management dominated unions.

Firstly, the FLA reported that all three factories breached its limits of 60 hours per week including overtime and local Chinese limits of 40 hours a week plus 36 hours overtime per month. In some cases employees worked more than seven days in a row without the required day off.

The health and safety issues at Foxconn are well documented, since a fatal explosion rocked the Chengdu plant in 2011, and the FLA said that 43 per cent of the workers it interviewed had experienced or witnessed an accident.

Finally, the FLA found that the union at Foxconn is dominated by management representatives and therefore doesn’t provide true worker representation according to the law of the land.

To address these problems, the FLA said Foxconn and Apple had agreed to comply with FLA and Chinese legal limits on working hours, reducing monthly overtime hours from 80 to 36. To be fair to Apple it had already begun to ‘micro-manage’ hours at the plants to ensure compliance. The FLA added that Foxconn would increase its workforce “significantly” to maintain capacity while reducing workers’ hours.

It also said that Foxconn agreed to develop a compensation package to ensure workers are protected from the loss of income incurred by reduced overtime, and added that workers cheated out of overtime payments would be retroactively paid according to the results of an audit. More importantly, the FLA said it is conducting a cost of living study to make sure that workers’ salaries meet its requirements for basic needs.