In 2010, the company draped its dormitory buildings in safety nets to prevent suicides.
Foxconn Technology Group, the trading name of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, opened its first mainland China factory in Shenzhen in 1988.1 By 2010, the company employed more than 800,000 workers in China across twenty plants, making it the largest private-sector employer in the country. Its clients included Apple, Samsung, Dell, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, and Amazon.
The main Shenzhen facility covered roughly one square mile and functioned as a self-contained city, with dormitories, cafeterias, bakeries, banks, and acupuncture clinics. Around 400,000 employees lived and worked within its perimeter.2
Workers typically shared dormitory rooms with nine other people and worked shifts of eleven to thirteen hours.2 The basic monthly wage of 950 yuan, roughly $140, was pegged to Shenzhen's official minimum. To earn enough to cover basic needs, employees worked hours of mandatory overtime each day.3 New recruits underwent "military training" to prepare them for the company's industrial discipline. Workers reported being forbidden from speaking to coworkers on the assembly line.
In 2010, eighteen employees attempted suicide at Foxconn's Chinese factories, and fourteen died.4 Most were migrants between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. The company responded by stretching safety nets around its dormitory buildings, hiring seventy psychiatrists, and requiring workers to sign agreements promising not to attempt suicide.5 A report compiled by twenty Chinese universities, based on interviews with 1,800 Foxconn workers at twelve factories, described the company as a "labor camp" and documented illegal overtime and unreported accidents.4
Foxconn also relied heavily on student interns, who constituted as much as 15 percent of the workforce at peak times, approximately 180,000 interns company-wide.1 Provincial governments in China directed vocational students to staff Foxconn assembly lines, telling those who refused that they would not be allowed to graduate. Some interns were as young as fourteen. By 2012, the company had raised wages but also raised production quotas by 25 percent, from 5,120 phone casings per worker per day to 6,400.5