The Full File on Foxconn
City report on Foxconn’s history is eye opening. Why didn’t state do its due diligence?
In 1974, the Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd, whose trade name is Foxconn, was founded as a small company that originally made plastic dials for televisions. By 2016 it had grown into the largest contract electronics company in the world.
A key reason for that growth was the company’s ruthless efficiency in keeping labor costs low by exploiting its employees. The harrowing details are documented in a recently released report by the City of Milwaukee’s Legislative Reference Bureau, which was commissioned by Ald. Bob Bauman.
You might have imagined the State of Wisconsin would have done such research before undertaking a deal with Foxconn, following the fundamental principle of commerce: Caveat emptor, or “let the buyer beware.” Instead the administration of Gov. Scott Walker has signed a contract awarding the largest subsidy ever paid by American government to a foreign company, without ever doing its due diligence to protect the interest of taxpayers who will pay this $4.1 billion subsidy.
The city report is heavily footnoted and filled with fascinating details, but it is Foxconn’s treatment of workers that really jumps out. “I thought, ‘my God, this is awful,’” Bauman says. “I’m re-reading (Upton Sinclair’s famous expose) The Jungle of a hundred years ago. The same company towns, the low pay, the worker injuries, the suicides.”
At its peak, the report notes, Foxconn had 1.3 million workers, but that has dropped to 873,000 due to its aggressive efforts to automate its factories. The workers are mostly Chinese. Foxconn is an international company and seeks the lowest labor costs. It has facilities in Mexico, Brazil, the Czech Republic and other countries, but has chosen to operate “the vast majority” of its manufacturing in China, with 12 factory complexes in 9 different cities, where the conditions are horrendous.
“There are numerous reports of employees working 7 days per week without the required 24-hour rest,” the report notes. “They work 10 to 12 hours per day, often on their feet. Some workers have reported standing so long that their legs swell. The work consists of repetitive, highly-detailed tasks. If a worker makes a mistake, management often berates the worker, which adds additional stress to working conditions. Company rules impose silence on the factory floors… A 2010 report from 20 Chinese universities described Foxconn factories as labor camps with widespread worker abuse and illegal overtime.”
Foxconn’s biggest factory, Longhua, houses about 450,000 workers “who live, work, eat and sleep” on a massive factory town-like campus that covers 1.16 square miles and includes its own fire brigade, television network and hospital. “The cramped dorms sleep eight per room.”
In 2012, the Fair Labor Association investigated conditions at Foxconn. Assessors spent 3,000 hours inside the factories, evaluating conditions based on visual observation and review of policies and procedures; interviewing hundreds of workers and managers; and surveying 35,500 randomly-selected workers.
The report found the average employee worked 56 to 61 hours per week, and more than 7 days in a row without the required 24 hours off. “Unscheduled overtime was paid only in 30-minute increments; accordingly, 29 minutes of overtime work would result in no pay, and 58 minutes of overtime would result in only one unit of overtime pay.”
The typical employee found work at the factory to be stressful, where “workplace accidents were common” and “had either experienced or witnessed an accident while at work.” They worked in a facility where “air conditioning and other ventilation systems worked inadequately” and commonly suffered “body pain at the end of a full day of work…most often neck, back, arm and hand pain.”
Workers had no say over policies and “union” committees actually were members of management, as were those who served on safety and health committees.
“In 2011, an explosion at one of Foxconn’s Chinese factories killed 3 workers and injured 16 workers. Aluminum dust caught in an air duct triggered the blast… In 2012, a fight at one of the dormitories escalated into a riot involving 2,000 people… the company admitted that 14-year-old children had been working (at one facility).” One worker “suffered an electrical shock and fell, requiring surgery to remove nearly half of his brain, which resulted in loss of memory, speech and mobility.”
Longhua had a rash of suicides, by 14 people in 2010. In response, Foxconn increased wages slightly, and reduced overtime, but it also “installed safety nets to catch people jumping from its buildings” and now “requires workers to sign an anti-suicide pledge, assuring that if they kill themselves, the company will not be blamed or held liable for compensation.”
But “suicides persist,” the report notes, “although not to the same degree… In 2012, approximately 150 Foxconn employees gathered on a rooftop and threatened to commit mass suicide in protest of their working conditions. In 2016, a smaller group repeated the threat.”
At the Sriperumbudur plant in India, there were similar patterns of exploitation, with some unique twists. The trainee status for employees lasted up to 15 months, although training was almost never longer than one month. And 40 to 60 percent of the workers were contract workers, with no limit to the number of contract extensions. “Wages of contract workers and trainees were lower than those of permanent workers,” the report notes. “This disparity violated the Constitution of India.”
“Night shift workers did not have a meal break; they only received a 5-minute break every 2 or 2.5 hours,” the report notes. “Workers were required to work on Sundays if monthly targets were not met or if there was an abundance of orders. If workers were not able to achieve targets, they were shifted to tasks like cleaning, which is considered a form of public humiliation in India.
“Workers were not allowed to take mobile phones into the factory. If there was a family emergency, the family member would have to come to the factory and locate the worker. Employees were threatened with criminal liability for speaking to the press.”
Workers were threatened by airborne toxic discharges, such as teratogenic mercury vapor, and by n-hexane, “a chemical used in making iPhone’s signature slick, glass screens” and which “can disrupt the central nervous system of humans and induce vertigo and muscular atrophy,” the report notes.
In 2010, more than 200 workers “had to seek medical help for symptoms such as fainting, breathlessness and coughing due to an incident involving pesticides.”
Some of the machines at the Sunguvarchatram plant produced noise levels of approximately 150 decibels — comparable to that of fireworks and firearms. “The National Institutes of Health has stated that prolonged exposure to noise levels at 80 (decibels) may cause permanent hearing loss. Workers were provided with foam earplugs, but they still experienced discomfort from the noise.”
As if all that wasn’t bad enough, another problem was that “overgrown bushes surrounded the factory and attracted insects, rodents and snakes. Snakes occasionally entered the factory and required removal.”
And given that the state’s Foxconn Act “creates major environmental exceptions for the project,” and that the Wisconsin DNR is stepping back regulations and passing responsibility onto the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, whose rules are being revised by the Trump administration, “Foxconn may have paper-thin requirements to meet in the way of environmental protection,” the report notes.
What the past history of Foxconn suggests is the company will look to aggressively cut costs both by underpaying and exploiting workers and by evading air and water pollution standards whenever possible. “They’ll try to avoid accountability as much as possible,” Bauman predicts. “And if there is too much pressure on the company from advocacy groups, they’ll go back to their friend Scott Walker for more legal exceptions.”
As for the idea of using train or bus transit to transport unemployed Milwaukee workers to Foxconn, there may be a reason the company has had no interest in discussing this. Its preference is for factory towns, with workers living on the Foxconn campus, to increase the company control over employees.
The company’s history suggests it will do its best to reduce worker rights and pollution controls to those that might have prevailed in the 19th century, all while enjoying a $4.1 billion subsidy which every Foxconn worker from Wisconsin will be helping pay through their taxes.
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More about the Foxconn Facility
- Mount Pleasant, Racine in Legal Battle Over Water After Foxconn Failure - Evan Casey - Sep 18th, 2024
- Biden Hails ‘Transformative’ Microsoft Project in Mount Pleasant - Sophie Bolich - May 8th, 2024
- Microsoft’s Wisconsin Data Center Now A $3.3 Billion Project - Jeramey Jannene - May 8th, 2024
- We Energies Will Spend $335 Million on Microsoft Development - Evan Casey - Mar 6th, 2024
- Foxconn Will Get State Subsidy For 2022 - Joe Schulz - Dec 11th, 2023
- Mount Pleasant Approves Microsoft Deal on Foxconn Land - Evan Casey - Nov 28th, 2023
- Mount Pleasant Deal With Microsoft Has No Public Subsidies - Evan Casey - Nov 14th, 2023
- Microsoft, State Announce Massive Data Center Expansion, Land Purchase - Joe Schulz - Nov 11th, 2023
- Gov. Evers Announces Microsoft Makes Major Investment in Wisconsin - Gov. Tony Evers - Nov 10th, 2023
- State Can’t Regulate We Energies $100 Million Project for Microsoft - Joe Schulz - Sep 20th, 2023
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Oh good God what a nightmare Career Politician Scott Walker, Trumpty Dumpty and Republicans have gotten us into! On top of all this WE have to pay FoxCON 4.5 Billion! Welcome to the Third World Wisconsin! So sad to see the state that helped improve worker’s rights and working conditions probably more than any other reduced to this. Wisconsin deserves better. The state deserves better than Walker, FoxCON or any other of these asinine Republican schemes.
Walker FOXCONNED Wisconsin!
Dump Walker
Probably not a stretch to say Foxconn is more trustworthy than Bob Bauman.
Walker is a scheming political opportunist who couldn’t care less about Wisconsin employees and taxpayer dollars. As long as Scott Walker can extend his political career little else matters. Scott Walker is the biggest scum bag politician this state has seen for decades. Please go away scum bag!
Don’t worry, Dems, they won’t be hiring any of you anyway for these ‘awful jobs.’ We don’t want glassy-eyed stoners working in a high-tech, next-gen assembly plant anyway!
Dems will have to work at Foxconn. Republicans aren’t smart enough to handle high-tech, next-gen work. Plus they don’t like to leave their trailers.
Whether conscious or not, it is useful that Alderman Bauman uses an example from the first Gilded Age to highlight one in our new Gilded Age. What is – or should be – surprising is that Wisconsin is the case study. But, does anyone imagine that the the Walker administration’s sponsors (Kochs, Hendricks, Menard, Adelson, etc.) find anything troublesome about Foxconn’s labor conditions and environmental practices? You would think that they would love to emulate those conditions and practices.
The historian F.W. Maitland once said, “We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.” Predicting the future is always a dangerous game, but, given what we know of the past, the likelihood is that the Walker/Trump regimes and their allies will leave behind a society divided by hatred and extreme inequality, environmental calamity, a shredded social safety net, and a ruined democracy run over the cliff by grasping plutocrats and their sycophants. The folly of the Foxconn scandal will almost certainly become apparent sooner rather than later, and, even then, will be denied by the true believers.
Which brings us to Jimbo, Wisconsin Conservative Digest, LenaTaylorMust…, Troll and the gang. As a group, they represent a chunk of the population, and much of the base that supports Walkerism and Trumpism. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, once wrote, “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed, and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion….Against stupidity, we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reason falls on deaf ears. facts that contradict ones prejudgement simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential…. In all of this, the stupid person is utterly self-satisfied, and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by gong on the attack….Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
A sucker is born every minute and this FoxConn scam proves that in Wisconsin, they voted for Walker.
Though I am not a huge Bob Bauman fan, he is a lot less gullible than Walker and Walker’s voters.
It seems as though Foxconn has caused half of Scott Walker’s brain to be removed as well!
While it may be slightly apocalyptic to compare the yet to be built WI facility to the existing employment picture in China and other developing counties, the reality is that this is not a tech company and the majority of the possible jobs will be low level and tedious. In today’s manufacturing economy, these positions will be difficult to fill and this will become the excuse for the disappointing number of jobs created.
If our states short-sighted leaders would have embraced the public transportation option when they had the chance, this could have been used to create opportunities for the under served portions of Milwaukee that are still dealing with double digit unemployment. Instead, these areas will continue to fight with the effects of generational poverty while jobs go unfilled near the IL border.
Nice plan…
@Lenataylorneedstoresign, Sorry, we don’t need your crappy Chinese tv screen maker tax payer subsidized “jobs!” We have real jobs and businesses and they aren’t government subsidized.
But guess what idiot! Amazon, Microsoft, google, Apple and most other truly innovative, iconoclastic AMERICAN technology companies (not Third World contract manufacturers like FoxCON) in fact, do not drug test for a reason! All their best programmers and employees are “glassy eyed stoners!” I know. I was born and raised in Seattle. Cannabis is legal for a reason! All my friends work at Amazon or MS or google to this day. They make millions, you make jack sh#t! So shut up and keep. chugging that rot gut liquor in Wisconsin and wondering why your life sucks and why there are no good jobs, businesses and few innovative global tech companies in Wisconsin and then thank an idiot republican like Career Politician Scott Walker. You can’t change reality. Walker FOXCONNED Wisconsin! Now pay up. 4.5 Billion is coming out of your hide!
Dump Walker!
Dump FoxCON!
Dump ALL Republicans!
Legalize cannabis!
Build a REAL economy!
Is it safe to say that the author does not own or use any products made in China or is he just a hypocrite.
@Aggie, good point anf that goes for high speed internet as well…Career Politician Scott Walker turned it down because he didn’t like the black guy who was president so all of rural Wisconsin suffeted and fell behind while Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa accepted and moved forward. It’s an election year so Walker is talking about rural internet now, many, many years too late and now we get to pay twice! Our federal taxes were squandered by the idiot Walker who turned down broadband under Obama (fear of a black planet anyone) and now our state taxes have to pay for his ineptitude! It’s too late Walker! We have all left for good or moved our businesses out of state. Wisconsin is still dead last in the USA in entrepreneurship and small business start ups as well as the state having poverty rates at 30 year highs. Fact! Sure there are “jobs” 8 bucks an hour, no benefits…far from what generations past had. Just think what we could’ve done for entrepreneurship and small business start ups in Wisconsin if Walker hadn’t bankrupted us on this FoxCON nightmare! What do we get up north for 4.5 Billion. Answer: Absolutely NOTHING but we can take solace in our SLOW ASS DSL straight outta 1996!
Dump Walker!
Dump ALL Republicans!
@Mike, take a hike loser! Your comments are stupid and add nothing to the conversation. Duh, if someone points out in great and accurate detail what a horrible company FoxCON specifically has been historically, somehow in your sad stupid world that applies to all other companies with ethical business practices in China? Sey can’t Really? Is your liquor soaked brain that disassociated from reality? Is it possible that someone is honestly that DUMB? Answer: YES! The name is Mike.
Dump Walker
Yes, Foxconn had a poor recond on workers rights, but they have been working on cleaning that up. You may notice no dates newer than 2012 in this article.
The pollution is the real concern , we as a community have to make sure this is watch closely.
The pollution is bad for sure but the 4.5 billion in Corporate Welfare for a foreign company that Career Politician and fulltime idiot Scott Walker chained us AND our children to is really, really horrifying as well.
Foxcon will be a shitty place to slave away at. To paraphrase Dave Chapelle, “Chinese jobs? What? I want to wear Nikes, not make them!” Same goes for iphones. Foxconned is right.
It’s true that Foxconn insists he is cleaning up its past record — how could they not and set up on this shore. But it is the same people and the same philosophy running this show and this story, with its footnotes are an invaluable part of the discussion.
Jimbo, Bauman didn’t write the report, he just requested it. The City’s Legislative Reference Bureau does unbiased research. When an alderperson requests something, he or she knows they’ll be getting straight information. It’s up to them what they do with it. Full disclosure: I used to work in the LRB. More than once an alderperson didn’t get the results they expected from us.
Guy4Life (15): In the report itself, there are quite a few references to 2017 and 2018 articles and books on conditions in China and India. That said, I am skeptical that FoxConn would try to reproduce its Chinese factory towns. I just don’t think they would work in SE Wisconsin.
@Terry Your rant just describes yourself. #spoton
Thanks for the enlightening report, the suspicion about Walker has always been that he only gives lip service to people who work for a pay check, because they always get the short end of his policy stick. Hard to believe Walker didn’t know about Foxconn’s horrific treatment of employees before he obliged state taxpayers to pay them $4+ billion. Walker can yap all he wants about the “hard working people of Wisconsin” but the die is cast, he can’t run from his disdain for clock punchers any longer. Why didn’t Walker include any conditions for safe working conditions and livable wages in his deal with Foxconn?
@mike, You show up for one reason consistently, to make ad hominem attacks and that’s it. So in that regard…Take a hike pee baby! You stink bad!
Only the Dems are stupid enough to oppose good jobs for working families in wis. They want people, on the dole, to vote fro them. Foxconn with multipliers will bring 50,000 jobs to SE Wis. Best deal in our history.
Most Dems are too stupid, or liars, not telling us that the money given to FoxConn, for building, is money from them being here, not money from other sources. We will not be shorting roads or schools i.e..
For WCD, aka Weird Cerebellum Disease, by the way, do you read/study anything before blabbering away? Democrats lead by 22 points (57%-35%) in party identification among adults with post-graduate degrees, and among those with college degrees or some post-graduate experience (49%-42%). “On the Dole”, is that some kind of oddball reference to the WWII hero, ex-Senator and Presidential candidate from Kansas or the much admired Sen Elizabeth Dole, first female senator representing N Carolina?
‘dole’ is actually a government assistance. WCD is hinting that liberals want to keep people dependent on the government in order to get votes. Perhaps he should think about how republican’s phony fiscal conservatism actually puts more people on government assistance programs by robbing them of a living wage.
It comes as no surprise to see WCD make another totally false claim. Republicans, not democrats, are actively trying to keep people ‘on the dole’.
Only the ‘Dems’ are smart enough to see this flim flammery for what it is. It’s a tragedy that you cannot, WCD. You guys sure like to be suckers for some reason.
Amazing our employment is at lifetime high. Old Man, under obama the dole made records.
Yet poverty rates in Wisconsin are at 30 year highs! That’s right as of 2016, poverty rates in the state formerly known as Wisconsin, now known as Walker’s Wississippi are at 30 YEAR HIGHS under Career Politician and Big Government moocher Scott Walker and republicans.
https://www.wpr.org/wisconsin-poverty-rate-reaches-highest-level-30-years
So what gives Career Politician and fulltime liar Scott Walker? The reality is unemployment is low but unfortunately most Wisconsinites are stuck in super crappy, pee in a cup, $7 an hour, no benefits, no worker’s rights, Third World country slave wage jobs, many people having to work 2-3 crappy jobs just to make ends meet. Walker and republicans are just fine with that. They want Wisconsinite’s dumb, broke and thus powerless. That’s why Career Politician Scott Walker decimated the education system and destroyed all worker’s rights in the state. Keep ’em “divided and conquered” as Walker likes to say. Keep ’em dumb, broke and powerless. That’s life in Career Politician Scott Walker’s Wississippi. Welcome to the Third World Wisconsin. You have been Foxconned!
Dump Walker
Half the people not working cannot pass drug tests, causing poverty.
Lefties cannot teach kids to read at MPS and other schools. That is source of the poverty.
Can Career Politician Scott Walker and republicans pass a pee test? That is the REAL question! They are public servants and taxpayers’ money is a sacred trust! Thus shouldn’t Career Politician Scott Walker and all these old white male republicans who are “on the dole” and whose careers in potitics for decades now have been completely subsidized by We the People, shouldn’t THEY pee in cups as they wish the working folks and poor to do? Walker and republicans could all be drunkards or druggies?! They need to pee in a cup to prove to taxpayers they aren’t all drunk or doped up on the jazzman’s reefer! If they don’t agree…
Well what do they have to hide?
there are 55,000 people watching them all the time. we need to break the inner city drug rings that are killing our kids, so taking out the customers works.
Not all the time! These charlatans need to pee on a cup!
We can’t arrest our way out of this but we can put the black market reefer cartels currently getting rich largely out of the cannabis business for good tomorrow by ending the abject, undeniable failure of cannabis prohibition. Fact.
Dump Walker in November and let’s move Wisconsin FORWARD!
Get a room, you two.
WCD, you hang your hat on an entirely misleading statistic, to apparently disquise the growing dismal economy that an increasing number of Wisconsites struggle with daily. GB QB Brett Hundley completed 61% of his passes last season, very close to the percent completed by Aaron Rogers. Does this mean Brett is well on his way to QB stardom replacing Aaron soon? Of course anybody who watched GB last season would say that conclusion is ridiculous. And so is yours, a misleading talking point, and nothing else. Why aren’t the poverty rates declining along with the unemployment rate as they should be? For the same reason the poverty rate was extremely high in the ante bellum South while full employment was the norm. The culprit is known as slave wages (you may recall they were $0/hour in the ante bellum South) and relative to the cost of living, there are far too many still working at close to that rate in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, long known for excellent educational opportunities k-12 and the binge drinking capitol of the globe, you blame teachers and alcohol and drugs for slave wages, a mind-numbing, irrational conclusion no serious person takes seriously. BTW, you ought to take an extended tour in the northern part of WI to see what abject poverty looks like, it looks white, is widely epidemic, in places that were once quite prosperous when people who work for a pay check could actually support themselves.
Our family came to Wisconsin in 1856 to farm 20 acres.
I lived in LaX, Wausau, Eagle River, Antigo, Iola.
Tour the state all the time for politics and hunting/fishing.
Am full aware of North problems that cannot be solved. Farming in north no good, some tourism, no one locates manufacturing there.
The Left fights mines or anything that would bring jobs.
@WCD, then let’s end prohibition so I can start up a new farming business up north and start to rescusitate the economy up north, you know, invest tons of capital in the economy, employee people, pay taxes and be prosperous and fruitful but it is Walker and republicans with their so called “small limited government” that is standing right in the way. Get out of the way big government! Americans got work to do!
Legalize it!
To all the big mouths on this lets get biking in spring. WE have rented the Milwaukee Mile to train, ride, race. Check with Wisconsin bike Fed and join.
Sure you have, buddy.
Bruce how does this compare with your job –pay and hours spent , emotional frustration , ours worked by Doctors , lawyers and leaders . At 82 i am down to 40 hours a week working in K-12 school climate/culture that feels more like pushing boulders up the hill . My pay is zero and our estate will support the advocacy in perpetuity . My effort actually sounds a bit stupid however i know that we now have 80-87 percent of students cheating in HS because its the way to the top , its what everyone does compared to 35 years ago 40 % but then they said it was wrong , they would not do it again and they were embarrassed . Keep that up and it is the end of our democracy one day —reference the 100 failed democracy’s ,city states Greek Roman aira who all failed our founders said because of a lack of virtue .
Why would this company locate in Wisc were there are few people to employ and expect to pay Chinese wages , it is not the infrastructure freebies , its not the deferred taxes , or the vocational education system or a love for our politicians , maybe our water source for i suspect cooling subject to the strong environment advocates . The story may not have been told yet .
it is something positive in placing our state in the tech advocacy ranks in the world ? Stay tuned .
Thanks for this excellent research and reporting. The implications of the report are truly disturbing, more disturbing than we might have imagined.
The comparison to “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair seems right. After decades of labor reform, are we retuning to the era of slave-like work conditions. What has Wisconsin done?
Bruce, Your scholarship, your research, your compassion, and editorial acumen are astounding. Wisconsin owes you deep respect, many accolades, and many Summer’s of joyous un-retirement ! 😇
J. Dean you are funny, ridiculous. Slave like work conditions in Wisconsin? who will work fro them? The only slaves in this country, are those caused by left wing policies that Obama had created.
I plan to keep some distance away from THE MILWAUKEE MILE while WCD is allegedly biking there. He is so impaired by hallucinations of the rumored ills of imaginary lefties that he could be dangerous on a bicycle.
Thanks, Bruce, for another well researched and well written editorial on a matter of great importance. Foxed by cons may have awakened members of the GREAT LAKES COMPACT with their expressed desire for much great lakes water – without serious environmental studies on potential impacts.