UPDATED – What appears to be a fire or explosion engulfed one of the buildings at the Foxconn Factory in Chengdu, China. Foxconn is reporting two casualties and 16 hurt and the damage does look severe and quite thorough. MICGadget reported that “10 fire engines, ambulances and 10 police cars” arrived on the scene. Reports state that a few floors in Building A5 (apparently part of the iPad 2 production line) were affected and that the explosion was caused by light dust igniting in one of the manufacturing rooms.
Auto-playing video after the jump. → Read More
A few months ago the Internet was aflame with suicides at Foxconn and then there were rumors that the massive manufacturing company was forcing its employees to sign “anti-suicide” pledges. Now, at least according to a Canadian news organization, Foxconn has confirmed that this is not true. “Foxconn does not ask its employees to sign any such documents, any reports to the contrary are inaccurate,” said Ellin Choy, a Foxconn spokesperson. → Read More
Ancient Chinese proverb says, “Man who goes against Apple will lose his right to eat any fruit ever again.” Digitimes is reporting through Chinese-language sznews.com that three employees were arrested by local police on December 26, 2010 and eventually charged on March 23, 2011 for violating the company’s trade secrets. Reportedly these employees leaked the iPad 2′s design to accessory makers. → Read More
My favorite blogger, Joel Johnson, took a supervised trip to Foxconn’s factories in Shenzhen, China last year and has finally gathered his reporting into an excellent piece in this month’s wired. His mission?
Still, after years of writing what is (at best) buyers’ guidance and (at worst) marching hymns for an army of consumers, I was burdened by what felt like an outsize provision of guilt—an existential buyer’s remorse for civilization itself. I am here because I want to know: Did my iPhone kill 17 people?
I present to you, friends, unadulterated, the horrors witnessed by French journalist Jordan Pouille and recorded in his video, “Inside the Foxconn Prison,” are truly manifold. In what will soon be the The Jungle of its day, Pouille’s video of Chinese factory workers living their oppressed lives while shopping for food, listening to pop music, and meeting for lunch reminds us that jobs suck everywhere and that factory jobs suck the most. → Read More
Our good buddy Joel Johnson went inside Foxconn’s 540,000 employee factory in Shenzhen. There are 950,000+ employees in China alone. To put that into perspective, Columbus, Ohio, my hometown, is home to 711,470 people. → Read More
Ah, capitalism. It looks like the value of manufacturing in China is slowly going down as companies like Foxconn are forced to treat employees like human beings. What does that mean? It means your next iPhone will be a bit pricier. → Read More
It’s not every day you get to look inside a major electronics factory. Most of the work done there is compartmentalized and the manufacturing done for one company never touches the manufacturing done for another. In fact, Foxconn’s R&D labs consist of a series of locked doors. You can only get into one and that’s only if you’re allowed in to see prototypes. It’s an amazing world of secrecy and deception.
That’s why it’s quite interesting that BusinessWeek got to sit down with Terry Gou inside the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. There they learned about the company’s efforts to stop everyone from killing themselves (parades, chants of “treasure your life”) and still maintain the backbreaking pace required of modern manufacturers. → Read More
Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronic components manufacturer that makes products like certain Dell computers and Apple‘s iPad and iPhone devices, was – as widely reported – hit by a string of suicides among its workers earlier this year.
Apparently, this hasn’t had much effect on their growth rate (surprise): according to Bloomberg, the company plans to hire as many as 400,000 workers in China in the next twelve months. → Read More
A pair of reports from Reuters today spell out some of the latest moves that electronics manufacturer Foxconn has made in response to a tragic wave of suicides at its largest Chinese factory. The spate of suicides has brought heat against both the manufacturer and its clients, which include Apple.
First, Reuters reports that according to Chinese news agency Xinhua, posters have appeared at Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant saying that it had “concrete evidence” that some of the suicides were motivated by the 100,000 yuan ($14,640) payout victims’ families were receiving. The posters reportedly go on to say “The act is wrong. Life is precious. To prevent such tragedies, Foxconn is to cease releasing compensation other than that provided by law”. → Read More
Foxconn employees, with the help of Apple, will receive a 66 percent raise. The increase will raise the average salary from $132 a month to about $292, an impressive number. There is a required performance review period for three months before the raises will be doled out. → Read More
Hon Hai Precision Industry, the anchor group for Foxconn, is offering its workers a 20% increase in pay as part of a regular third-quarter cycle. It’s important to note that this is a cyclical was planned months in advance the suicides are ancillary to the eleven suicides thus far. → Read More
I’ve been interested in gadget manufacturing for a while now and, as I reported a few months ago, things are pretty bad but they’ve been worse. Now, however, we’re seeing clusters of suicides at Foxconn as well as an undercover “report” from Foxconn’s “Hell Factory.” I’m calling bull. First, consider that Foxconn has 400,000 employees in Shenzhen alone. Cleveland, Ohio has 478,403 residents as of the 2000 census and I suspect that’s gone down. You’re not amazed by the number of suicides in Cleveland, right? It’s par for the course. People go nuts in Cleveland, even though they have a great meat market and the Cleveland Clinic is really nice. People don’t want to live, sometimes, right? → Read More
Buried in a Reuters report on Foxconn, a division of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, is a description of an attack on a journalist visiting a Foxconn factory in China while chasing down a lead on an Apple product. The journalist was taking pictures of the factory from a public road, he says, when two guards attacked him and tried to drag him into the factory: → Read More
Buried in a Reuters report on Foxconn, a division of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, is a description of an attack on a journalist visiting a Foxconn factory in China while chasing down a lead on an Apple product. The journalist was taking pictures of the factory from a public road, he says, when two guards attacked him and tried to drag him into the factory: → Read More
This is probably the last piece of the puzzle concerning the iPhone suicide incident. The NYT is stating that Foxconn gave the man’s family more than $44,000 and his girlfriend got an Apple notebook. That’s all, folks. Come up with your own conclusions and/or morbid jokes. This sad event makes us sick. → Read More
First, we all need to shut up because we don’t know the facts. When (if) more is revealed, then we can talk about it with confidence, anything less is sensationalism — not that we’re any strangers to that. But argument from ignorance is an insult to everyone involved. Second, we need to shut up because it has nothing to do with Apple, or Foxconn for that matter. It has to do with big business, big money, and big pressure. It could have been any product and any company. The iPhone is big, sure, but what if it were a new, secret Xbox? Or a car? Or a weapon? Billion-dollar Company X gives out 16 protoype Y’s to a few of its trusted employees. One disappears, corporate espionage is very much a possibility. The person is pressured, interrogated, perhaps beaten — and in the end, perhaps is killed or perhaps chooses to commit suicide. Did you think this hasn’t happened before? Did you think this doesn’t happen all the goddamn time? → Read More
Every once in a while you get a story so strange and horrible that it takes a while to sink in. I’m talking about the suicide of a Foxconn employee who was caught doing something with an “iPhone prototype” and jumped out of the window. Matt wrote: So the story goes that a 25-year-old man at Foxconn – where iPhones are born – was to send 16 iPhone prototypes to Apple from the Chinese factory, but one was lost somewhere. The Foxconn security department then proceeded to illegally search the man’s apartment and interrogated him. But that was too much for the man that might be responsible for leaking a prototype of the next iPhone. A few days ago on July 16, he jumped from a 12-story building because of the incident. It’s probably not out of the realm of possibilities that he not only was roughed up, but also lost his job even though that’s not mentioned in the report. This means two things: that there is an iPhone prototype floating around (a highly dubious proposition considering that they would not have “mailed” any prototypes to Foxconn nor does Foxconn particularly need prototypes from Cupertino – they only need plans and someone from Apple to supervise the manufacture) and that the CE industry is built on false promises and exploitation. It’s financial exploitation, physical exploitation, and psychological exploitation and we’re all part of it. → Read More
So the story goes that a 25-year-old man at Foxconn – where iPhones are born – was to send 16 iPhone prototypes to Apple, but one was lost somewhere. The Foxconn security department then proceeded to illegally search the man’s apartment and interrogated him. But that was too much for the man that might be responsible for leaking a prototype of the next iPhone.
Update after the jump → Read More
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