Apple’s Student Labour Problem Is Only The Tip Of The Iceberg In China
Aayush Ailawadi finds out if the Apple student labour case is part of a much bigger Chinese problem...
Less than a month after Apple started sales of the iPhone X, the technology giant found its main supplier in Asia employing high-school students working illegal overtime to assemble its latest flagship, the Financial Times reported.
The interns at a factory operated by Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., part of Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Group, worked voluntarily and received benefits, Apple said in a statement. “During the course of a recent audit, we discovered instances of student interns working overtime at a supplier facility in China,” Apple said. “When we found that some students were allowed to work overtime, we took prompt action.”
The group of 3,000 students aged between 17 and 19, from the Zhengzhou Urban Rail Transit School, were sent to the factory as part of the mandatory three-month 'work experience', the Financial Times report said. Six students confirmed that they worked 11-hours a day, which is longer than what student interns can work for under the Chinese law.
BloombergQuint spoke to Yuan Yang, the journalist who broke the story, and Michael Ma, project officer at SACOM, a Hong Kong-based NGO, to understand what’s going on at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant and if the report is only the tip of the iceberg.