Migrants elbow for Foxconn jobs despite labor probe

By James Pomfret

February 23, 2012 3:28 AM EST

Apple's top manufacturer in China, Foxconn Technology, is having no problems luring fresh workers to churn out ever more gadgets, despite the firm's reputation as a tough employer that has put it under a thorough probe into its labor practices.

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On a smoggy day in a gritty industrial suburb of Shenzhen, thousands of job seekers, many migrant workers from the countryside, massed outside the north gate of Foxconn's gargantuan factory at Longhua, taking part in an epic recruitment drive to supply factory hands to meet relentless production quotas for iPhones and iPads globally.

As police sealed off roads in the area, recruiters lined up the young men in ranks, peppering them with questions before shepherding small groups into a building to register and undergo physical and psychometric tests.

"As you can see, everyone wants a job here," said Wang Jintao, a 19-year-old from central Hubei province. "I've been coming here every day for two weeks now. Perhaps today will be my lucky day."

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The thousands of migrants now flocking daily to Foxconn's recruitment center at Longhua is a sharp contrast to other smaller factories in southern China that have competed viciously to find workers since the Lunar New Year holidays in late January.

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Despite the publicity generated by a spate of worker suicides in 2009 that exposed a strict, militaristic production line culture, Foxconn is viewed by many workers as a tough but rigorously organized and fair employer in the harsh industrial landsape of the Pearl River Delta.

"The facilities are first-class; the physical conditions are way, way above average of the norm," Auret van Heerden, president of the Fair Labor Association (FLA) told Reuters in an interview on February 15. In comments to Bloomberg a few days later, Van Heerden appeared to take a less rosy perspective on Foxconn, saying it had "tons of issues" to address.

The Washington D.C.-based FLA is currently carrying out an Apple-sanctioned extensive study of work conditions at Apple's top eight suppliers in China, including Foxconn, the world's largest manufacturer with close to 1.2 million workers in China alone.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has described the probe as an "unprecedented" audit to mitigate longstanding criticism of the maltreatment of workers at some suppliers.

Working conditions at Foxconn, whose flagship unit is Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industries group, have in particular been a constant thorn in the company's side.

"NO TIME TO BREATHE"

Hu Baoqiang, a young migrant worker who assembled iPhone 4s at Foxconn's sister industrial plant at nearby Guanlan, said the line pressure was suffocating in his small task of placing metal covers over chips at a rate of some 1,000 phones an hour.

"It wasn't a very difficult job but you had to keep doing it without rest. It felt like there wasn't even time to breathe," he said outside the Foxconn gates, as other workers crowded around, nodding in agreement. "The supervisors are always watching you. The pressure was very great."

Even so, Hu was looking for work at Foxconn in Longhua.

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