Foxconn Surveyed

The staff told reporters that the leaders of the group had already issued a notice. The third party labor organization designated by Apple Corp will come to investigate in February 13th, involving production technology and production safety.

The third party organization is the Fair Labor Association (hereinafter referred to as the "FLA", Fair Labor Assosiation).

On the same day, a reporter's statement from FLA showed that the agency started an independent investigation of Foxconn factory in Shenzhen on the 13 th.

The statement said that FLA had decided to intervene in the Foxconn factory due to previous reports of its harsh labor environment.

Liu Kun, spokesman of Shenzhen Foxconn technology group, told reporters that FLA's research in Foxconn started three days from Monday morning.

Liu Kun said Foxconn expects the outside world to have a fair and objective understanding of Foxconn, and at the same time disdain to hide and gloss over it.

According to the information disclosed by FLA to our newspaper, we will go to Foxconn Chengdu factory in the next few weeks.

Previously, the Zhengzhou factory area reported by the media was not included in the investigation.

Nervous or calm?

It is not just Foxconn that attracts the outside world.

In fact, some critics have tried to pull FLA down the moral highland.

The newspaper reporters found that members of the company pay annual membership fees and other appropriate fees in the FLA charter.

As of press release, Jorge Perez-Lopez, the executive director of the agency, has not replied to our reporter's mail in response to questions about its independence. Lopez,

Internal mail

This week, Apple's official website revealed that the company should ask FLA to start a special volunteer inspection for Apple's assembly suppliers including Foxconn.

According to FLA statement, last month, apple joined FLA as a member company.

Like all FLA member companies, apple agrees to comply with FLA's code of conduct for all its supply chains.

The code is clear that enterprises pay salaries must not be lower than the local minimum wage standard; in principle, the working hours should not exceed 48 hours per week, and overtime should not exceed 12 hours.

Liu Kun told our reporter that Foxconn, as the largest producer of Apple products, has made research in this area under the arrangement of Apple Corp.

From Foxconn's point of view, we welcome the third party assessment agency's independent assessment of Foxconn employees' production and life, and will also help Foxconn's future rationalization.

Liu Kun said that FLA's research has been going on for three days since Monday morning. In order to ensure the independence and objectivity of the evaluation, Foxconn's functional departments can only cooperate with the research, but Foxconn does not know exactly which employee has interviewed or investigated.

When asked whether Foxconn would inform employees in advance, responding to the temporary adjustment of the time limit and control of speech, Liu Kun said that the third party assessment was not the first time for Foxconn, but the contact with FLA was the first time, expecting the outside world to have a fair and objective understanding of Foxconn, and at the same time disdain to hide and gloss over it.

"Employees have the right to speak. We do not shy away from employees saying Foxconn has problems."

Liu Kun said.

Yesterday morning, our reporter saw at the entrance of Foxconn Park in Longhua, Shenzhen. When the lunch time was over, a large number of workers went out to eat.

The above Foxconn staff told our reporter that they had received an internal mail sent by the leaders of the group. "There is no special preparation work, mainly including taking care of personal affairs and maintaining the factory environment."

Another Foxconn employee on the apple product motherboard production line told reporters that they did hear that ILO came to the factory to investigate, but they did not see them in the factory area.

This year, the recruitment climax of Shenzhen Foxconn came earlier than that of the returning industry. On the eighth day of the lunar new year, 5000 new employees were recruited in the Foxconn Longhua Park, most of which were "post-80s" and "post-90s".

Queuing for applicants is comparable to the panic buying team in front of Apple stores.

Besieged city

The recruitment of workers in Shenzhen Foxconn recruitment hot shows that workers already know how to vote with feet.

Liu Kun said earlier that in 2011, Foxconn's basic salary rose to 1750 yuan, and after 6 months, the salary could be over 2200 yuan.

Since February 1st, the minimum wage of full-time workers in Shenzhen has increased to 1500 yuan.

The temptation of "high salary" has allowed some migrant workers to listen to the "jumping incident of Foxconn employees" even when they applied for jobs.

Liu Kun has told our reporter that Foxconn has psychological counseling centers in every park, and every day he receives messages from the care center.

One of the short messages reads: "10 more points, so and so to the care center, initially diagnosed as depression."

A girl who worked in Foxconn for more than a year told her newspaper about her mentality of besieging the city.

"Come in and regret it, go out and regret it."

She said, "when I first came in, I was not familiar with the environment, and some of the lines were impolite. They would scold our girls and stress their work.

Go out, the wages outside are not Foxconn, and work more tired. "

Yes, please come in, please go out.

In December 2011, there were six employees who worked in the Southern District of Foxconn, Chengdu, reflecting Foxconn's rise in salary.

He presented a document to reporters that the "6+3" trial and assessment mode of staff level staff at the conference on human resources was revised to "3+3+3" trial and assessment mode meeting contents.

According to the document, "according to the spirit of the president's office meeting in August 16, 2011, the" 6+3 "trial and assessment mode is revised to" 3+3+3 "trial and assessment mode.

According to the original "6+3" mode, taking Shenzhen factory level staff as an example, the starting salary for the first 6 months of the trial period is 1550 yuan, while the 3+3+3 mode is the first to third months, the starting salary is 1550 yuan, the fourth to sixth months 1600 yuan ~1650 yuan, seventh ~ ninth months 1650 yuan ~1750 yuan.

This means that the new assessment mode will improve the treatment of employees.

The above documents show that the regulations have been effective since October 1, 2011, and the Chengdu plant started trial in September 1st.

The employee said the provision had not been implemented by mid December 2011.

He said he had been to the human resources department of the Chengdu plant, but was dismissed after that.

The iPad plant of Foxconn Chengdu production base was put into operation in October 2010, and the shipment volume exceeded 20 million units in 2011.

A person familiar with the matter said that in order to rush to iPad production plant, Chengdu built 150 thousand square meters of steel structure workshop in only 66 days, and completed the production in 76 days. It was called "Chengdu speed" by Foxconn.

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Independent questioning

Like Foxconn, FLA is not lacking in controversy.

According to FLA's official website, the association is a non-profit organization.

In 1999, FLA was founded by a number of universities, nonprofit organizations, Nike and Liz Claiborne.

Since its founding, FLA has investigated more than 1300 factories in Asia and Latin America.

FLA members include 34 companies and nearly 200 universities.

At the beginning of its establishment, with the support of President Clinton, FLA's original intention was to prevent unfair competition and set the bottom line for those companies that have been looking for low-cost suppliers in other countries such as China and Bangladesh.

But in the early days, due to the excessive tolerance and protection of members, FLA was criticized by numerous labour organizations and advocates of anti sweatshops.

For this investigation, many opponents again raised doubts about FLA.

"FLA does have some good performances, but we do not think that is enough to make it self proclaimed as an independent investigative body, because it depends to a certain extent on the capital operation of enterprises."

Scott Nova, executive director of a factory supervised organization supported by universities, said Scott Nova.

The FLA statute, under the entry of FLA guidelines for enterprises, retailers and suppliers, calls for FLA member enterprises to pay annual membership fees.

The number of membership fees will be determined by the board of directors of the association according to the annual income formula of each member company.

At the same time, FLA also wrote in February last year the fair labour and liability sources ordinance that member companies pay annual membership fees and other appropriate expenses.

Since the organization has only dozens of staff members, its main investigative work has been completed in cooperation with other consultative bodies that meet the FLA standard, and is called Independent External Monitoring.

According to the statute, FLA has set up a wholly owned subsidiary, FLA Independent External Monitoring LLC (FLA IEM, LLC), FLA, for exclusive external independent supervision.

Each member company pays for FLA IEM and LLC at a certain time to pay for FLA's independent investigation of its member factories.

Teresa Cheng, an international action coordinator for an anti sweatshop, said that a previous case showed that PT Nikomas, a supplier of Nike in Indonesia, had agreed to pay $950 thousand to compensate 4500 workers for a total of 600 thousand hours of overtime in the past two years. "If their investigation is thorough enough, such serious problems should be revealed," Teresa Cheng said.

Lopez said that FLA did not investigate every company one by one, and Nike had deployed an identification and error correction system in its supply chain.

Reporters found that six of the board members of FLA were from the corporate sector, and one of them is from Nike.