Since 2010, Foxconn and Longhua have been in and out of the media spotlight, though poor conditions, worker unrest, and even suicides have continued. Meanwhile, Apple’s other major iPhone manufacturer, the Shanghai-based Pegatron, Foxconn’s rival, has been charged with exploiting workers and forcing brutal stretches of overtime in patterns that eerily mimic its competition’s. An investigation revealed that workers were routinely logging hundred-hour workweeks and toiling as many as eighteen days in a row, and the BBC obtained footage of workers falling asleep on the assembly line. Labor advocates worried that Pegatron was even worse.
So I traveled to China to try to get an up-close look at what it took to manufacture the world’s most profitable product, designed by a globally celebrated innovation engine some five thousand miles across the Pacific, in a nation that’s both the prime producer of the one device and its fastest-growing market. First stop, Shanghai.
Somewhere, in nearly every corner of this sprawling city, someone is building a part that will end up in an iPhone, or maybe snapping the whole thing together. Of the two hundred addresses that Apple lists for its top suppliers on its annual report, nearly half are located in just two cities: here and Shenzhen.
The forty suppliers here in Shanghai, like TSMC, the chip manufacturer that produces the iPhone’s ARM-based brain, are scattered far and wide across the city.
When I arrive at TSMC’s headquarters, the security checkpoint is posted far from the complex, so I can’t see much of anything besides the well-groomed lawn and the mammoth gray-and-red plant walls. The guards, of course, won’t let me in for a closer look. I snap some photos and jog back to the idling car. A security guard follows me, yelling. He’s demanding that I delete the photos and won’t let us leave until I pretend to have done so. It’s a recurring theme during my sightseeing tour of Apple’s suppliers. In fact, I’d soon be able to tell immediately which building in a given neighborhood housed an Apple component factory: it was the one with high security, barbed wire, or posted guards.
That was especially true of Pegatron, which had cameras loaded with facial-recognition software at the entrance; every worker, all of them forming a human river that flowed into the factory’s mouth, swiped a card and glanced into the camera, and the turnstile clacked open. Pegatron’s on the outskirts of the city, a subway stop away from Disney Shanghai; I walk the perimeter with my fixer and find it swarming with hundreds of college-age workers with lanyards dangling around their necks. We pass a fortune-teller, and I hand him ten renminbi to tell me the future of the iPhone. “Everyone says it is a good phone and the future is getting better because it’s increasingly profitable,” he says. Though he also tells me that I have a good face and that women are going to chase me around, so I’m not entirely sure he’s to be trusted. We interview as many workers as we can and begin to confirm a picture of a high-stress workplace marked by long hours and repetitive tasks, a factory where most hires last only about a year before quitting.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the iPhone has transformed China. On top of physically building the device, China is now one of the world’s top consumer markets too. Shanghai is fascinating—a blend of enthusiastic entrepreneurship and manufacturing muscle dominated its smartphonic tech sector. But it’s got nothing on Shenzhen.
Shenzhen was the first SEZ, or special economic zone, that China opened to foreign companies, beginning in 1980. At the time, it was a fishing village that was home to some twenty-five thousand people. In one of the most remarkable urban transformations in history, today, Shenzhen is China’s third-largest city, home to towering skyscrapers, millions of residents, and, of course, sprawling factories. And it pulled off the feat in part by becoming the world’s gadget factory. An estimated 90 percent of the world’s consumer electronics pass through Shenzhen.
Just across from Hong Kong, on China’s mainland, downtown Shenzhen feels sleek, new, strained, and chaotic. Traffic is snarled and the lights beat neon, but Shenzhen often seems more mall-punk than cyberpunk.
“I believe Shenzhen embodies the spirit of China,” says Isaac Chen, who was born in Shenzhen after his parents moved there in the 1990s in the first wave of the business boom and whom I was fortunate enough to sit next to on the plane. “People working very hard, long hours, in new industries. I was among the first generation to be born there,” he says. “When I was a kid, there were hills everywhere. Now it is flat. They destroyed the hills to build the coastline. It is completely changed.”
Chen says the conditions in many factories there are “brutal,” though he does not say this sorrowfully. “When we were in Paris, we met a sweeper; he spent all day sweeping the same road, and took pride in the fact that he had done the job well for twenty years. We could not understand this. In China, we always want to improve. There is a fear that if we do not, we will have to go back to nothing, back to farming the land for food,” he says. “China is all about work. Work and money. We do not take vacations.”
A cabdriver let us out in front of the factory; boxy blue letters spelled out FOXCONN next to the entrance. It was a typically gray day in Shenzhen. The security guards eye us, half bored, half suspicious. My fixer, a journalist from Shanghai who I’ll call Wang Yang, and I decide to walk the premises first and talk to workers, to see if there might be a way to get inside.
A main entrance to Foxconn’s Longhua factory.
The first people we stop turn out to be a pair of former Foxconn workers. Neither is shy.
“It’s not a good place for human beings,” says one of the young men, who goes by Xu. He’d worked in Longhua for about a year, until a couple months ago, and he says the conditions inside are as bad as ever. “There is no improvement since the media coverage,” Xu says. The work is very high pressure, and he and his colleagues regularly log twelve-hour shifts. Management is both aggressive and duplicitous, publicly scolding workers for being too slow and making them promises they don’t keep, he says. His friend, who worked at the factory for two years and chooses to stay anonymous, says he was promised double pay for overtime hours but got only regular pay. He says he was promised a raise but never received it. “So that’s why we wanted to leave the company.”
They paint a bleak picture of a high-pressure working environment where exploitation is routine, and where depression and suicide have become normalized.
“It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying,” Xu says. “Every year people kill themselves. They take it as a normal thing.”
Over several visits to different iPhone assembly factories in Shenzhen and Shanghai, we interviewed dozens of such workers. Let’s be honest: To get a truly representative sample of life at an iPhone factory would require a massive canvassing effort and the systematic and clandestine interviewing of thousands of 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 at a nearby noodle shop, or congregating somewhere 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 personally experienced the despair Foxconn was known for, and still others had taken jobs there just to try to find a girlfriend. Most knew of the reports of poor conditions before joining, but they either needed the work or it didn’t bother them. Almost everywhere, people said the workforce was young, and turnover was high. “Most employees last only a year” was a common refrain.
Perhaps that’s because of the pace of work is widely agreed to be relentless, and the management culture was often described as cruel.
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 seventeen hundred iPhones passed through her hands every day; she was in charge of wiping a special polish on the display. That comes out to polishing about three screens a minute for twel
ve hours a day. Another said he worked as part of an inspection team of two or three people, and they were in charge of doing quality assurance for three thousand iPhones a day.
More meticulous work, like fastening chip boards and assembling back covers, was slower; these workers have a minute apiece for each iPhone. That’s still around six or seven hundred iPhones a day. Failing to meet quota or making a mistake can draw a 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.
“They call Foxconn a Fox Trap,” he says. “Because it tricks a lot of people.”
“I was tricked to work for Foxconn,” Xu says. “I intended to work for Huawei,” he adds, referring to the Chinese smartphone competitor. “People feel way better working for Huawei, better corporate culture, more comfortable.” In fact, he says, “Everyone has the idea of working in Foxconn for one year and getting out of the factory and going to work for Huawei.”
But when he went to a recruiting office, they told him Huawei already had enough workers and they took him to Foxconn. He believes this is because Foxconn pays recruiters extra to find more people—it simply wasn’t true that Huawei was full.
And that, he says, was just the first part of the Fox Trap. “They just didn’t keep their promises, and that’s another way of tricking you.” He says Foxconn promised them free housing but then forced them to pay exorbitantly high utility bills for electricity and water. The current dorms sleep eight to a room, and he says they used to be twelve to a room. But Foxconn would shirk on social insurance and be late or fail to pay bonuses. And many workers sign contracts that subtract a hefty penalty from their paychecks if they quit before a three-month introductory period. “We thought Foxconn was a good factory to work in, but we found out once we got there that it was not.”
On top of all that, the work is grueling. “If you got one hundred salary, you have to pay three hundred effort,” Xu says. “You have to have mental management”—otherwise, you can get scolded by bosses in front of your peers. Instead of discussing performance privately or face to face on the line, managers would stockpile complaints until later. “When the boss comes down to inspect the work, they get a heads-up to prepare,” Xu’s friend says. “If the boss finds any problems, they won’t scold you then. They will scold you in front of everyone in a meeting later.”
These meetings are apparently routine. At the end of the day, the manager will ask everyone on a team to stand up and gather around. In addition to praising productive workers and offering a general debriefing, the manager will single out anyone he or she believes made mistakes.
“It’s insulting and humiliating to people all the time,” his friend says. “Punish someone to make an example for everyone else. It’s systematic,” he adds. “There are bonuses, and if you get scolded you won’t get the bonus.”
In certain cases, if a manager decides that a worker has made an especially costly mistake, the worker has to prepare a formal apology. “They must read a promise letter aloud—‘I won’t make this mistake again’—to everyone.” One of his colleagues, who took the blame for someone else’s mistake to protect them, “cried, [he was] scolded so badly.”
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 victim was a college student who worked on the iPhone assembly line. “Somebody I knew, somebody I saw around the cafeteria,” he says. After being publicly scolded by a manager, he got into a quarrel. Company officials called the police, though the worker hadn’t been violent, just angry.
“He took it very personally,” Xu says, “and he couldn’t get through it.” Three days later, he jumped out of a ninth-story window. “I was out for lunch, and saw everyone making a scene. He was on the ground surrounded in blood.”
So why didn’t the suicide get any media coverage? I ask. Xu and his friend look at each other and shrug. “Here someone dies, one day later the whole thing doesn’t exist,” his friend says. “You forget about it.”
Xu Lizhi, who committed suicide at Longhua in September 2014, left behind diaries and poetry that opened a window into that attitude.
A Screw Fell to the Ground
A screw fell to the ground / In this dark night of overtime / Plunging vertically, lightly clinking / It won’t attract anyone’s attention / Just like last time / On a night like this / When someone plunged to the ground—9 January 2014
“We are on top of this. We look at everything at these companies,” Steve Jobs said after news of the suicides broke. “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. It’s a factory—but my gosh, they have restaurants and movie theaters… but it’s a factory. But they’ve had some suicides and attempted suicides—and they have 400,000 people there. The rate is under what the US rate is, but it’s still troubling.” Tim Cook visited Longhua in 2011 and reportedly met with suicide-prevention experts and top management about the epidemic.
In 2012, a hundred and fifty 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 suicide as a bargaining tool. In 2016, 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.
Everyone has gotten used to the “ghost of death” at Foxconn. Foxconn claims that they’re working on the problem, but he thinks even company officials don’t know what to do. “Everyone thinks it is cursed.” In addition to the nets and the counseling, administrators have tried other, more unconventional means too.
“They built a tower to scare the ghosts away,” Xu says. “In any buildings that don’t look ‘normal,’” he says, “they keep the lights on all day for superstition.”
Xu and his friend call the action of suicide “pretty silly” and say they left because of the day-to-day dehumanization. They had been approached about joining management, they say—perhaps another part of the Fox Trap—before bailing. Xu had begun training. “I couldn’t bear with everything,” he says. “Couldn’t stand it. They forced me to do things I didn’t want to do,” like discipline and humiliate workers. “If you didn’t obey their ways they reduced your salary.” He says, with a hint of pride, that though he thought he could do the job, it wasn’t worth it. He didn’t want to give anyone such a hard time, he says. “Even if they offered much more salary I wouldn’t take it.”
All of the above is why the turnover rate is so high; there are very few longtime workers here, Xu says. “There were fifteen people with me when I entered the factory. Now there are only two left.” Not including him—he quit to go to work at an electronics shop. He says that he’s “absolutely more happy now that I’ve left the factory.”
When I ask him about Apple and the iPhone, his response is swift: “We don’t blame Apple. We blame Foxconn.” When I ask them if they would consider working at Foxconn again if the conditions improved, the response is equally blunt.
“You can’t change anything,” Xu says. “It will never change.”
That may not be merely a gut feeling. One night in Shenzhen, I set up a Skype interview with Li Qiang, the executive director of China Labor Watch. Li himself was a former Foxconn worker; he became a labor organizer and an advocate for better working conditions after living through the horrors at the company. He fled the country and now runs CLW out of New York City.
Li had high hopes for the chance at reform in the wake of the suicide epidemic and the resulting media spotlight. “Media reports are helpful,” he says. “In 2011, when Foxconn abuse was reported by the media and could be asked about the suicide issue, wages rose almost one hundred perc
ent and working conditions also improved. I think it’s because of media pressure that Foxconn raised wages.” In 2009, he says, the average worker’s wages were around 1,000 renminbi ($145) a month, and by the end of 2010, it was raised to 2,000. “But after that, media transferred their attention to other subjects,” he says. “Comparing 2013 and right now, nothing has been changed. Apple might have done a little bit in the beginning, but compared to what they promised, that’s too little.”
Back at Longhua, Wang and I set off for the recruitment center and the main worker entrance. Xu had called his friend Zhao, who still works at Foxconn—he had been promoted to floor manager years ago, and he had agreed to try to use his limited authority to get us past security for a tour.
He told us that he thought iPhones were made in factory block G2, in case we got in.
We wind around the perimeter, which stretches on and on—we have no idea this was barely a fraction of the factory at this point. The factory walls loom over one side of a busy street; the other gives way to Shenzhen blocks and shops. A cheap LED billboard announces the recruitment center; it broadcasts images of cheerful workers at computer stations, quick shots of colorful assembly lines, footage of big blue swimming pools, large empty gyms, and nice-looking, clean buildings. It reeks of a Fox Trap.
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