>In June 2011, Zhang and his teenage classmates were taken out of their family homes and dispatched to a factory making electronic gadgets. The pupils were away for a six-month internship at a giant Foxconn plant in the southern city of Shenzhen, a 20-hour train ride from their home in central China. He had no say in the matter, he told researchers. "Unless we could present a medical report certified by the city hospital that we were very ill, we had to go immediately."
>The report details the push to find workers to produce the iPhone 5’s 8-megapixel camera, and the means by which companies like Flextronics International, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, recruit for positions on factory assembly lines. According to Bloomberg, companies recruit across the poor cities and villages of Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Nepal to staff up the army of workers needed to create components. To accomplish that task, recruiters hire brokers, who charge families high fees — often a year's worth of wages, with interest — for the opportunity to work on the supply side.
>Factory workers were reportedly also obliged to surrender their passports to brokers to ensure they paid off their debts. This practice amounts to the very same kind of bonded labor that Apple has tried to combat in its recent supply-chain audits. According to Bloomberg, Flextronics has commissioned an outside group to conduct an investigation into the fees being foisted on recruits. Apple spokesperson Chris Gaither told Bloomberg that the company will ensure that "the right payments have been made."
Neither of those is the story I had in mind FWIW. I can find you more such reports from mainstream media if you like.
People get charged for a job, shipped out to a location; kept in a virtual confinement (eg passports taken, not allowed off campus), then sometimes the work disappears and they're left high-and-dry with a debt and still no job.
Yes I imagine many do make more in factories but that's not at all the whole story, not by a long shot.
>In June 2011, Zhang and his teenage classmates were taken out of their family homes and dispatched to a factory making electronic gadgets. The pupils were away for a six-month internship at a giant Foxconn plant in the southern city of Shenzhen, a 20-hour train ride from their home in central China. He had no say in the matter, he told researchers. "Unless we could present a medical report certified by the city hospital that we were very ill, we had to go immediately."
Or this http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/7/5078402/workers-in-apples-... :
>The report details the push to find workers to produce the iPhone 5’s 8-megapixel camera, and the means by which companies like Flextronics International, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, recruit for positions on factory assembly lines. According to Bloomberg, companies recruit across the poor cities and villages of Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, and Nepal to staff up the army of workers needed to create components. To accomplish that task, recruiters hire brokers, who charge families high fees — often a year's worth of wages, with interest — for the opportunity to work on the supply side.
>Factory workers were reportedly also obliged to surrender their passports to brokers to ensure they paid off their debts. This practice amounts to the very same kind of bonded labor that Apple has tried to combat in its recent supply-chain audits. According to Bloomberg, Flextronics has commissioned an outside group to conduct an investigation into the fees being foisted on recruits. Apple spokesperson Chris Gaither told Bloomberg that the company will ensure that "the right payments have been made."
Neither of those is the story I had in mind FWIW. I can find you more such reports from mainstream media if you like.
People get charged for a job, shipped out to a location; kept in a virtual confinement (eg passports taken, not allowed off campus), then sometimes the work disappears and they're left high-and-dry with a debt and still no job.
Yes I imagine many do make more in factories but that's not at all the whole story, not by a long shot.