HON HAI Group, the assembler of Apple’s iPhones, may raise wages in China by 20 per cent after a series of suicides at the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics.
The company plans to implement the plan soon, according to Edmund Ding, a spokesman at Taipei-based Hon Hai Precision Industry, the flagship of the group also known as Foxconn Technology Group. He declined to specify why the Taiwanese electronics maker planned to raise wages.
At least 10 people have died this year at Hon Hai’s manufacturing complex in Shenzhen and police are treating the deaths as suicides, prompting chairman Terry Gou to recruit counsellors, install nets in dormitories and open his factories to the media.
Shenzhen police and customers from Apple to Dell are inquiring into Hon Hai’s working conditions after the deaths, half of which occurred in May.
The minimum monthly wage in Shenzhen is between $132 and $146, according to the city government. Foxconn employees are paid a base salary of about $132, according to China Labor Watch, a New York-based non-profit organisation that promotes worker rights in China. Hon Hai declined to comment on the salaries in China.
Li Ping, a spokesman for the municipal government in the southern Chinese city, said the Shenzhen police were examining the deaths.
Wang Rong, Communist Party secretary of Shenzhen municipal committee, other city officials and labour union officials went to the plant on May 26th to investigate, the government said in a statement on its website Thursday.
The central government, State Council and the Guangdong provincial government were taking the suicides very seriously and wanted the relevant authorities to “accelerate efforts and take appropriate measures and to support Foxconn to deal with the situation and prevent similar incidents from happening again”, Mr Wang said.
Mr Gou has rejected allegations from labour-rights groups that Hon Hai is a “sweatshop” and opened the manufacturing complex to the media to defend the company’s working conditions.
Foxconn employees who committed suicide may have suffered from “extreme pressure”, calling into question the labour practices of manufacturers in China, S Prakash Sethi, professor at the City University of New York’s Baruch College Zicklin School of Business, said in a Bloomberg television interview yesterday.
Prof Sethi, who said he had never been to Foxconn’s plant, added: “In some factories I visited, workers are supposed to stand eight hours a day without any chair to sit, they have to ask permission to go to the bathroom.”
China needed to increase worker wages as a proportion of the nation's gross domestic product, the state-run China Dailysaid yesterday in an editorial. The ministry of human resources and social security had made little progress in amending existing wage regulations because of "strong opposition" from employers, the Beijing-based English-language newspaper wrote. Inaction may further fuel the escalating tension highlighted by the striking workers at a Honda plant in Guangdong province and worker suicides at Foxconn Technology, according to the editorial.
A group of nine sociologists, including academics from China’s Tsinghua University and the sociology department of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, have posted an online appeal to the central government to “immediately end the model of development that has sacrificed people’s basic dignity”. – (Washington Post service-Bloomberg)