Axehole

Foxconn Electronics, a company that makes iPods for Apple, has denied a report insinuating that the company was making iPods in sweatshops.

Edmund Ding, spokesman for Foxconn, said there were huge discrepancies between the truth and the claims in the report, which he said seems like a vicious attack on the company.
The British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, last week claimed that iPods were being made in Chinese factories by employees working in “slave” conditions. The paper alleged that one factory at Longhua — a town just outside the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen — employed 200,000 workers, each of whom had to work 15 hours a day for a monthly pay of US $50. The paper said the workers lived in rooms which housed 100 people each.

Ding maintains that Foxconn abides by the employment law in China, which stipulates that the minimum wage for a worker in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone is actually a whopping 810 yuan (US $101) a month, and 700 yuan outside the special economic zone.

According to the company, it’s also working hard to improve workers’ living conditions to make them less sweatshop-like, providing dormitories with free laundry service, sports facilities, libraries, and other facilities.