Electronics giant Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), known internationally as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), yesterday said that it had started an investigation after a labor group described illegal working conditions at one of its Chinese factories producing Kindles, tablets and smart speakers for Amazon.com Inc.
The investigation by US-based China Labor Watch found a series of problems, including inadequate worker training and overtime pay, excessive overtime hours beyond limits set by Chinese law and verbal abuse of workers by management.
“All workers are subject to long hours and low wages,” the report said, adding that workers at Foxconn’s plant in Hengyang in Hunan Province made an average of US$2.26 per hour.
Foxconn has long faced allegations of poor treatment of its hundreds of thousands of employees in China. It attracted widespread scrutiny after a spate of worker suicides at a plant in southern China making Apple products several years ago.
The labor group’s investigator worked on the factory’s night shift, brushing dust off Alexa Echo Dot speakers from 8pm until the small hours of the morning.
“After 6am, I fell asleep on the assembly line,” the investigator wrote, adding that the factory floor was hot and humid, and workers needed permission to leave their chairs to go to the bathroom.
When the shift ended, workers retreated to dormitories crowded with six bunks. Pictures showed primitive living conditions.
“Our company has already started a comprehensive investigation, if any irregularities are found, we will immediately improve and correct them, and safeguard our company’s corporate social responsibility,” Foxconn said in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange.
The investigation found that workers put in 100 hours of overtime per month during peak periods, vastly exceeding the 36 overtime hours allowed by Chinese labor law, and used intermediary labor companies to provide 40 percent of workers so that they were not directly employed by Foxconn.
The tactic allows factories to dodge some provisions of China’s labor laws, critics have said.
“Because I hadn’t slept enough, my face and eyes were all swollen,” the investigator wrote. “My hands never stopped moving.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy