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Foxconn folds under pressure, drastically declaws lawsuit
It's tough work running the multi-billion dollar industrial powerhouse that is Hon Hai Precision Industry. First you get slammed with damning accusations about working conditions at your iPod-producing Foxconn plant, and like any responsible corporate citizen, you completely deny the allegations and threaten legal action against the "conspirators" responsible for slandering you. Then, even after you've admitted to some labor law violations and an outside investigation by Apple confirms these as well as other breaches in its supplier code of conduct, you somehow think the best course of action is to still sue the Chinese journalists who covered the story in order to make their lives a living hell. Well once again good old Hon Hai has admitted that it dropped the ball on this one, citing "great public attention on the target of the injunction" as the reason that it both drastically reduced the damages it was seeking from $3.8 million to a symbolic one yuan (12 cents) and withdrew its request to freeze Wang You's and Weng Bao's personal assets. So in other words, the leaders of iPod City didn't so much regret the suit as they did the public outcry that followed -- yet another example of media pressure shaming big business into doing the right thing. Hmm, now where did we just hear about a similar sequence of events happening in the United States? No matter -- power to the people![Via Techdirt]
