Foxconn may be hiding underage workers from authorities

Foxconn workers have said that the company have transferred under age employees to other departments or did not schedule them to work, to avoid them being discovered by authorities investigating the factories under the Fair Labor Association.

AppleInsider have gathered a report which makes for interesting reading “Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) project officer Debby Sze Wan Chan relayed the claims in a recent interview with AppleInsider. SACOM is a Hong Kong-based NGO that was formed in 2005 and has been researching labor rights violations in the electronics industry since 2007.

Chan said she had heard from two Foxconn workers in Chengdu last week that the manufacturer was “prepared for the inspection” by the Fair Labor Association that had been commissioned by Apple and began last week.

“All underage workers, between 16-17 years old, were not assigned any overtime work and some of them were even sent to other departments,” Chan reported the workers as having said.”

This comes at a bad time for the company, after such glowing reports from FLA president Auret Van Heerden who spoke to reporters last week saying that the Foxconn facilities were ‘first class', although he said that there were a lot of things that needed to be fixed before it would get the thumbs up. He defended Apple, saying that they had paid a quarter of a million dollars to join the FLA and was paying for the audits as well.

Tim Cook, Apple CEO sent a letter which said that Apple to care about every worker in their supply chain. According to reports however the workers don't feel that this is the case at all and that Apple really don't care.

You can read more about this over here.

Kitguru says: Are Foxconn really hiding underage workers?

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