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The fate of a generation of workers: Foxconn undercover fully translated (update: videos added)
Machine translations are still years or even decades away from perfection, so rather than sending you to an auto-translated page, we now present -- with exclusive permission from Southern Weekend -- a human translation of this damning article on Foxconn by undercover reporter Liu Zhiyi. (Photo: Southern Weekend) I know of two groups of young people. One group consists of university students like myself, who live in ivory towers and kept company by libraries and lake views. The other group works alongside steel machineries and large containers, all inside a factory of high-precision manufacturing environment. These guys always address their seniors as "laoban" (boss), and call their own colleagues -- regardless of familiarity -- the rude "diaomao" (pubic hair) in loud. After going undercover in Foxconn for 28 days, I came back out. I've been trying to tie the two pictures together. But it's very difficult. Even with people living in these two places sharing the same age, the same youth dream. My undercover was part of Southern Weekend's investigation on the then six Foxconn suicides. We soon found out that most of Southern Weekend's reporters were rejected due to age -- Foxconn only recruits people around the age of 20. In comparison, being just under 23 years old, I was quickly brought into Foxconn. The 28-day undercover work made a strong impact on me. It wasn't about finding out what they died for, but rather to learn how they lived.
Undercover Chinese reporter exposes Foxconn working conditions (update: full English translation)
Some time in April, Chinese news site Southern Weekend sent its intern, Liu Zhiyi, on a 28-day undercover mission at Foxconn's Shenzhen factory, as part of an investigation on what could've led to this year's numerous suicides in one of China's largest factories. While the report doesn't comment on the company's management and support networks (or the lack of) for front-line workers, it appears that the real problem lies in Chinese workers' definition of a "good factory" -- one that pays more by means of offering overtime hours. It's clear what's causing this perception -- there's the sub-standard minimum wage in Shenzhen, and then there are the companies abusing this fact to lure workers with overtime hours above the legal limit. Update: Thanks to Southern Weekend's exclusive permission, we've now published the full human translation of the Chinese report.
