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Inside Apple's iPhone Factory In China

May 30, 2021
Last month it emerged that Apple, the world's most valuable company and supposedly an icon of squeaky-clean progressive values, brushed aside allegations of child labor within its key supply chain in China. The suggestion is that a Big Apple supplier called Suyin Electronics employed workers as young as 14 in the interest of keeping up with the fierce appetite for Apple products in the West, Apple reprimanded Sooyin but maintained ties for months. and even years later with new accusations like this and a series of suicides associated with the brand's manufacturing base over the years we thought. It's about time we laced up and took a look inside an iPhone

factory

in China.
inside apple s iphone factory in china
The first and most important thing to understand is that Apple's factories in China are not technically Apple factories at all, but rather the California tech giant outsources its manufacturing to a company called harm high precision Industry co-limited, which is known much more popularly as foxconn technology group or simply foxconn foxconn was founded by colorful taiwanese businessman terry goo, who has been jokingly dubbed the donald trump of taiwan and is reportedly worth just over 5 billion us dollars. Foxconn is the largest employer in China, with around 1.3 million employees in 2018. It makes consumer electronics for a variety of companies, from Samsung to Dell and HP, but is most famous for making Apple products and, most notably , iPhone Half of all iPhones in the world (many hundreds of millions) are manufactured in a sprawling Foxconn facility outside Zhengzhou.
inside apple s iphone factory in china

More Interesting Facts About,

inside apple s iphone factory in china...

Zhongzhou is a city of around nine and a half million people in Hunan province, historically a poverty-stricken province of the local People's Republic. The Zhongzhou Foxconn plant is often referred to as iPhone City and that's a pretty fair description. At peak times, around 350,000 employees work there, most living in on-site dormitories in preparation for a big iPhone launch. new

iphone

, plant can produce up to half Millions of units per day, that is almost 350 per minute, around the

factory

, which supports businesses such as restaurants, massage parlors and shoe stores, have sprung up to support the gigantic workforce inside the Shenzhou factory, which is dedicated to the final stage of iPhone assembly.
inside apple s iphone factory in china
About 400 discrete tasks are interrupted. Taken apart and carried out by your army of workers, most employees will perform a task repeatedly, over and over again, day after day. This could be as interesting as soldering or as boring as putting a single screw into the back of devices over and over again, so how do they recruit? In 2017, an nyu student named Dejian Zheng went undercover for six months at the Zhengzhou plant to investigate the employment situation according to Zen's report. All he had to do to get hired was join a queue of eager applicants outside factory. Zheng was asked for his identification and retired to recite the English alphabet, as it was commonly used in the factory.
inside apple s iphone factory in china
He was then in Zheng working on an assembly line with around 200 other recruits monotonously assembling hundreds of devices per shift. He said the work was boring and exhausting, but he did not report any specific abuse during the grueling six-day week, other than a supervisor who yelled from time to time. His main complaint was that the overtime was presented as voluntary, but was clearly mandatory under penalty of being fired. Elsewhere, the Chinese government itself has come in to keep this lucrative business running smoothly, stepping in to help with a never-ending recruitment drive during the peak summer months, on the eve of the traditional fall iPhone release date.
A speaker is said to be in Zhongzhou. Factory gate shouting at workers who are optimistic and diligent. Hunan Province even sets quotas for the number of workers that villages and towns must provide to keep the factory running efficiently and effectively. The gender balance in the factory is said to be approximately equal. and the typical age of a factory worker is between 18 and 25, although interns are typically as young as 16, and while underage workers have been found in Apple's supply chain, nearly a dozen were found to be of fifteen-year-old children worked in three factories, according to one report, there are no reports that the Foxconn facility in Jungja was directly involved.
The conditions of the workers in Zhengzhao, although not as brutal as the sweatshops, appear extraordinary to Western eyes. Factory workers stay close to the plant in dormitory buildings up to 12 stories high with eight workers sharing a room sometimes with only one bathroom per floor shared by up to 200 people, the US-based lobby group China Labor Watch discovered during undercover investigations that workers are actively prohibited from resigning from their jobs during peak hours, but admitted that the most egregious allegations of brutality and harassment of others may have been exaggerated. A worker whose role was to apply a special polish to LCD screens said that she handled around 1,700 iPhones a day and that it was a mundane job, but also that there were worse things to endure in life than monotony, no matter how much The routine of Working six days in a row and only seeing family on Sundays if they live locally clearly takes its toll.
The most common complaint about working at Foxconn in Zhengzhao is boredom. When New York student Zheng spent those six weeks on the production line, he said he grew up quickly. to hate it, real workers speaking anonymously have claimed high staff turnover after a year, people get bored or disinterested, they claim that when that happens, they leave, other Foxconn workers have said that while Building iPhones is not exactly your childhood dream, the facilities are no better. or worse than other Chinese factories they had worked in, of course, there is a much darker side to the accusations against Apple, although it is not directly related to the assembly plant in Zhengzhou, it has been reported that Apple products have been manufactured using forced Uyghur labor. ethnic minority in China who endure horrible working conditions and even wage theft by unscrupulous supervisors according to the New York Times.
Lawmakers in the United States have proposed legislation designed to curb the ability of American companies to use weaker forced labor. It is said to be aimed at weakening the bill, although Apple, for its part, says it did not lobby against the legislation but rather, as the company says, had constructive discussions with relevant congressional staff and regarding manufacturers. of MacBook at Suyan Electronics that we mentioned at the beginning when the issue came to light. Apple told the company to address the issue or risk losing business, but Apple continued to work with its yin for three years. Former members of Apple's so-called supplier responsibility team told reporters based on the information that the Syrian incident was not isolated and that Unfortunately, profits appear to have been the driving force among the decision-making, so how will it be?
The future for Apple and its labor practices? As living standards in China inevitably improve, so does the cost of labor and therefore factories may move elsewhere. Foxconn recently found itself in trouble for exaggerating its staffing requirements for Apple in order to illicit profits from the Californian company, so it's not always a cozy relationship between the two giants. Most pertinent undercover student Zheng noted in 2017 that several stations on the production line where he worked were already taken over by robots known internally as foxbots, a trend that will surely continue no matter how their iPhones are manufactured in the future.
Let's hope that Apple's labor practices live up to the company's lofty brand ideals and that Steve Jobs' latest disciples can at least help someone somewhere get a good job. What do you think justifies Apple keeping suppliers at arm's length to keep costs competitive for the end user? Tell us your ideas in the comments and don't forget to subscribe for more thought-provoking ideas. technology videos

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