13 July, 2011A recent China Labour Watch (CLW) report exposes appalling working conditions in ten Chinese electronics factories that supply products to multinational electronics companies such as Dell, Salcomp, IBM, Ericsson, Philips, Microsoft, Apple, HP, and Nokia.
From October 2010 to June 2011 CLW investigators posed as factory workers and interviewed a total of 408 electronics workers in the Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces in China about factory conditions. They came to the conclusion that working conditions and labor practices not only violated numerous Chinese labor laws, but also the social responsibility codes of conduct of the multinational electronic brand companies.
The majority of the violations concerned overtime hours, wages, labour intensity, labor contracts, and recruitment discrimination.
- Workers were required to work excessive overtime, up to 160 hours per month.
- In nine of ten investigated factories the minimum monthly wage did not cover basic living costs.
- The high working pace exposed workers to long-term occupational illness or injury.
- Many factories signed coercive labor contracts with workers who often were not properly informed about them.
- All ten factories investigated had discriminatory recruiting practices based on age, gender, and medical condition.
CLW concludes that the inhuman working conditions in these factories not only reflect severe problems in China's electronic manufacturing industry. They also reveal serious systematic problems in the international electronics industry as a whole. Multinational electronic brand companies promote the ideals of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), but their actions directly contradict them.
The findings confirm earlier reports about Apple and Foxconn, reported here.
The CLW report points to a number of areas where reform is needed. The full report, Tragedies of Globalization: The Truth Behind Electronics Sweatshops, can be found at www.chinalaborwatch.org.