From SCDigest's On-Target E-Magazine
April 18, 2012
Supply Chain News: A Rare Peak Inside Apple's Contract Manufacturer
Foxconn Opens Door to NPR's Rob Schmitz; Conditions Much Better than Most Reports Would Have You Believe, but Still Some Issues; Thousands of Young Workers Head Back Home
SCDigest Editorial Staff
In the wake of the drama around working conditions at Apple suppliers, most notably at giant contract manufacturing Foxconn (see Headlines Said Fair Labor Association Found Numerous Violations at Apple/Foxconn Facilities, but Issues were Actually Quite Modest), a reporter for National Public Radio (NPR) was recently able to get a rare inside look at a Foxconn facility - and the result was very interesting.
Rob Schmitz, a US reporter based in Shanghai, in fact says he was only the second journalist allowed inside the secretive Foxconn operations, at Foxconn's largest factory in China in the city of Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong (commonly referred to as Foxconn City). He also spent a few days interviewing workers outside the gates of the giant complex, a move of which he says neither Apple nor Foxconn was aware.
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A Foxconn executive said the younger generations of Chinese workers in urban areas simply don't want to toil on an assembly line anymore.
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What Do You Say?
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What did he find? First, he was surprised at how manual the assembly operations there were - and therefore explaining why the factory needs the nearly 250,000 plus workers Foxconn employs and often houses there.
I've been to other factories before, and you see usually at factories a lot of machines and workers here and there. But in this factory, on the iPad assembly line, what first hits you is just the sheer amount of people," Schmitz says. "You see line after line of hundreds of workers, and you get this relation that this is a real manual labor process for what is a machine that's very sleek and looks like a machine actually made it. But in fact, every single part of that is being put together by a person."
For example, even the motherboard for the iPads is painstakingly assembled by hand across dozens of steps, rather than coming in from a supplier in a finished form. The process uses some relatively simple machines to supplement a few steps, though Foxconn has been saying it will be added more robotics soon to eliminate the need for some labor.
Shortage of Workers?
While in some respects the conditions and certainly pay at Foxconn may not match up with Western standards, some 500 people per day show up at the facility to apply for a job , most of them from hundreds of miles away in the rural areas of the country. Nearly all of them are between 18 and 25 years of age - it is startling, actually, to see the parade of workers looking all in the same basic age bracket streaming into the plant in the NPR video found further down this page.
And many if not most of those are looking for lots of overtime pay to sock away for the future or to send back home to relatives. That is important because the most prominent fault found by the Fair Labor Association, which recently audited Apple's Foxconn assembly operations, was that workers were putting in more overtime hours than allowed by Chinese law.
But even that report itself found a small percentage of workers thought they were working too much, according to a survey the FLA completed with over 35,000 of them, and many wanted more overtime, not less.
(Manufacturing article continued below)
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