The Fair Labor Association has released its report on the treatment of workers at Foxconn‘s plants in mainland China. The major conclusion of the report is that the workers are putting in too many hours on the job.  The FLA concludes that worker hours should be limited to 49 hours per week, including overtime, which is the maximum number of hours allowable under Chinese law. [They will not suffer a pay reduction as a result of less hours.] Apparently, there is no local enforcement mechanism for such limitation in China, and pressure from Apple was necessary to get Foxconn to agree to take this action. [As an aside, have any of the other manufacturers who subcontract to Foxconn taken any action regarding worker protections?]

Of course, it is not clear that most workers at Foxconn’s plants want fewer hours. The report indicates that over a third of the workers want to work for longer hours and only 18% said they felt they were being overworked. For example:

“We are here to work and not to play, so our income is very important,” said Chen Yamei, 25, a Foxconn worker from Hunan who said she had worked at the factory for four years.

“We have just been told that we can only work a maximum of 36 hours a month of overtime. I tell you, a lot of us are unhappy with this. We think that 60 hours of overtime a month would be reasonable and that 36 hours would be too little,” she added. Chen said she now earned a bit over 4,000 yuan a month ($634).

Keep in mind that many Americans routinely work more than 49 hours per week, in order to earn additional funds from overtime.

Finally, from the FLA report, comes this good news:

Our assessments did not find issues related to child labor, forced labor or payment of the legal minimum wage.

Update:  The New York Times reports today that there are significant shortages factory labor in China and that this, in part, accounts for high levels of overtime. The article also describes the desire of some in the existing work force to work more hours, not less.

In interviews with The New York Times over the last several years, workers at other factories in southeastern China have frequently said that they wanted long hours because they were young, had little to do during free time in their factory dormitories and were eager to make as much money as quickly as possible so as to return to their home villages.

When China imposed its current laws limiting overtime four years ago, the regulations set off considerable complaints from workers and companies alike. There is a limit of three hours a day of overtime and six days of work a week.

“The law is very restrictive about what it allows,” a foreign businessman in southeastern China said Friday. He insisted on anonymity lest his comments be construed as criticism of the government or of labor advocates. Labor laws in the United States are actually less restrictive, in some ways, in allowing workers to put in even longer hours than in China. Generally speaking, as long as American workers receive time and a half pay for anything over 40 hours a week, there are no limits on total hours.

 

Related articles

• What’s Going Wrong At Foxconn (And What Can Be Done To Fix Things) (cultofmac.com)