It seems that Foxconn and labour scandals go hand in hand and product launches and public releases forces the manufacturing company to go into working conditions violation overdrive.
According to fresh reports, Foxconn is allegedly forcing interns to work overtime to meet with PS4 production demands thereby violating Taiwanese company’s labour rules. The report first appeared on Quartz and in a statement Foxconn has revealed that it has already put checks on overworked interns to ensure that such violations are not repeated.
Foxconn said that it will be ensuring that policies are reinforced such that students and interns are not forced to do night shifts and it will remind all these interns about their rights to terminate the voluntary overtime participation at any time.
Foxconn has made the headlines for all the wrong reasons for quite a few years. The minimum working age at China’s largest manufacturing company is 23 there have been several violations where it has employed college interns who are well below that age. There have been cases wherein even school students have been employed as interns and are paid regular wages despite forcing them to work for longer hours.
According to an internal investigation nearly 1,000 interns were found to be working during night shifts to meet with production demands from Sony ahead of the November 15 launch.
Foxconn founder Terry Gou is of the opinion that the bigger picture is that there is a shortage of labour in China because labourers and students are rejecting factory jobs in favour of easy and relaxing jobs present in the service sector and over the Internet.
