How many foxconn employees

So take this for what it is: efforts to talk to often skittish, often wary and often bored workers who were coming out of the factory gates, taking a lunch break or congregating after their shifts.

The vision of life inside an iPhone factory that emerged was varied. Some found the work tolerable; others were scathing in their criticisms; some had experienced the despair Foxconn was known for; still others had taken a job just to try to find a girlfriend. Almost everywhere, people said the workforce was young and turnover was high. Since the iPhone is such a compact, complex machine, putting one together correctly requires sprawling assembly lines of hundreds of people who build, inspect, test and package each device.

One worker said 1, iPhones passed through her hands every day; she was in charge of wiping a special polish on the display. That works out at about three screens a minute for 12 hours a day. More meticulous work, like fastening chip boards and assembling back covers, was slower; these workers have a minute apiece for each iPhone.

Failing to meet a quota or making a mistake can draw public condemnation from superiors. Workers are often expected to stay silent and may draw rebukes from their bosses for asking to use the restroom. Xu and his friend were both walk-on recruits, though not necessarily willing ones. The current dorms sleep eight to a room and he says they used to be 12 to a room. But Foxconn would shirk social insurance and be late or fail to pay bonuses. And many workers sign contracts that subtract a hefty penalty from their pay if they quit before a three-month introductory period.

On top of that, the work is gruelling. Instead of discussing performance privately or face to face on the line, managers would stockpile complaints until later. They will scold you in front of everyone in a meeting later. In certain cases, if a manager decides that a worker has made an especially costly mistake, the worker has to prepare a formal apology.

This culture of high-stress work, anxiety and humiliation contributes to widespread depression. Xu says there was another suicide a few months ago. He saw it himself. The man was a student who worked on the iPhone assembly line. After being publicly scolded by a manager, he got into a quarrel. I ask. Xu and his friend look at each other and shrug.

In , workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump. They were promised improvements and talked down by management; they had, essentially, wielded the threat of killing themselves as a bargaining tool.

In , a smaller group did it again. Just a month before we spoke, Xu says, seven or eight workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump unless they were paid the wages they were due, which had apparently been withheld. Eventually, Xu says, Foxconn agreed to pay the wages and the workers were talked down. We blame Foxconn. Wang and I set off for the main worker entrance.

We wind around the perimeter, which stretches on and on — we have no idea this is barely a fraction of the factory at this point. After walking along the perimeter for 20 minutes or so, we come to another entrance, another security checkpoint. I have to use the bathroom. And that gives me an idea.

I see the universal stick-man signage and I gesture to it. Another in Zhongmu town, which makes personal computer connectors, has not fully resumed work as it suffered the worst damage, sources said. There is strong demand for new workers elsewhere as well. At Foxconn's factory in South China's Shenzhen, new workers can earn up to 26 yuan per hour, up from 20 yuan in previous years, a recruitment manager told the Global Times on Monday.

He noted that the production preparation for Apple's new products has come earlier than before to secure the launch. Apple has asked its suppliers to increase the number of iPhone 13 series devices in stock to 90 million, a 20 percent increase over the number of iPhone 12 series in , Bloomberg reported. This request shows the obvious pressure that Foxconn is under, experts said. Extreme weather conditions are also causing uncertainty for some local manufacturers, including Foxconn, in terms of production and logistics.

Due to the influence of Typhoon In-Fa, Zhengzhou will have moderate rain from Tuesday to Thursday, with heavy rain in some parts of the region, the Zhengzhou Meteorological Bureau reported on Tuesday. That report prompted an audit from Apple, which found "no instances of forced overtime" but noted that "employees worked longer hours than permitted by our Code of Conduct"—over 60 hours a week.

Apple has performed such audits every year since. Last April, the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekend sent a young reporter into Foxconn to work undercover for a month; he returned with bleak tales of hopelessness and "voluntary overtime affidavits. Foxconn has denied the reports and said it complies with all Chinese regulations regarding working hours and overtime.

That 17 people have committed suicide at Foxconn is a tragedy. But in fact, the suicide rate at Foxconn's Shenzhen plant remains below national averages for both rural and urban China, a bleak but unassailable fact that does much to exonerate the conditions at Foxconn and absolutely nothing to bring those 17 people back.

But the work itself isn't inhumane—unless you consider a repetitive, exhausting, and alienating workplace over which you have no influence or authority to be inhumane. And that would pretty much describe every single manufacturing or burger-flipping job ever. I walk one afternoon to the brassiest concentration of Shenzhen's manufacturing power, the SEG Square electronics market in the Futian district.

My Taiwanese guide, Paul, has spent the better part of a decade in Shenzhen as a steward for Western electronics companies seeking to procure components or goods from one of the city's thousands of suppliers. Here in SEG Square, the products of those suppliers fill glass cases and hang from pegboards in vast, low-ceilinged grottoes that would echo if they weren't crammed wall to wall with vendors' stalls.

Elsewhere in Shenzhen, such markets are stocked with bamboo knickknacks and counterfeit puffy vests; this one is filled with obviously fake iPhone chargers. SEG Square's markets are crowded, loud, and mildly mephitic from cigarette smoke and the odor of fresh-baked electronics.

Whole floors are dedicated to knockoffs, not just at-first-glance-perfect clones of popular products but also cargo-cult evocations, like FM radios cast from a third-generation iPhone mold that probably wasn't convincingly accurate in the first place.

It all looks like so much junk, but there is something touching about it. Each item was once the moment's work of a human being. Paul has seen his share of factories in Shenzhen over the years. I ask him about Foxconn, and he echoes the sentiment I've heard from others: Whatever problems Foxconn has, it's still one of the top places to work in the area. We stop to haggle with a vendor over five nonfunctional dummy iPhones in mythic white that I want to buy as gag gifts for friends back home.

Foxconn was now a billion-dollar avatar of globalization, and they were feeling the rubbernecked gape of international scrutiny.

The living quarters on the Shenzhen campus were recently handed off to property management companies that are more experienced at addressing the living needs of employees. Foxconn hopes the outside firms will be quicker to respond to tenant complaints, although some critics suggest that the company hopes to outsource some of the blame as well. When Foxconn constructs new inland factories, the living quarters will be managed in partnership with local governments.

Foxconn has also built onsite counseling facilities, which are staffed by psychologists and counselors. I toured two such facilities. One, sharing storefront space on a busy avenue, has agents who can help workers replace lost keycards or buy prepaid mobile-phone cards to call home; this place was fairly busy.

Another, off the main drag, was a full-on care center with music-therapy rooms, private counseling, and lounge areas; when I visited, it was nearly empty. In one room, a life-size Weeble Wobble with a scowling face could be smacked with a padded baseball bat.

It relieved my own stress for a moment. But the most ambitious effort to address worker morale is a modest-looking electronics store on the Foxconn campus, right next to a shop selling fresh fruit.

It's called Ten Thousand Horses Galloping. I'm assured the name has more pizzazz in Chinese. Inside, you can buy rice cookers and desk fans and phones. And according to Foxconn executives, it's the future of their company. Foxconn campuses already have company stores where workers can buy the products they manufacture at discounted prices. Ten Thousand Horses Galloping is designed to be an electronics store for the rest of China. Foxconn plans to offer franchises to employees and even grant them a little startup capital.

The idea is to give some lucky, hard-working employees a way to bring a touch of entrepreneurial spirit back to their home provinces, especially in the poorer west. The workers get to own their own businesses; Foxconn gets to supply the stores with goods.

To date, Foxconn has granted franchises to 60 employees and several more to outsiders. Foxconn positions Ten Thousand Horses Galloping as a new direction for the company, one that allows it to shift into retail while tapping into the cream of the roughly million-strong workforce it has cultivated in China. But the store also offers another benefit to Foxconn, one that wasn't even needed until recently: employee retention. In recent years, factories have been sprouting up in China's interior to take advantage of cheaper labor.

Workers aren't flocking to Shenzhen as they did a decade ago, when it was one of the only places to get a manufacturing job. Even Foxconn itself is building a facility in Hunan, after being lured by multibillion-dollar tax and investment incentives from the provincial government. Shenzhen may soon relinquish its role as the stoked furnace of the Chinese dream. But will that mean even greater expansion of the middle class, with commensurate benefits—or just the same old system shifted a thousand miles to the west?

The Foxconn counseling centers provide employees with everything from life-size punching bags to music therapy— employees can even reload their calling cards. Since Foxconn installed nets on all buildings at its Shenzhen campus, the suicide rate among employees has declined dramatically.

In America, we have wrestled with the idea of divine sanction since the country's inception. Some of us believe we have a God-given dominion over the earth; others argue that we're bound to a larger Gaian system and are, at our best, caretakers.

My heart is with the caretakers.