ABUSIVE INTERNSHIP

On June 25, a 17-year-old student identified under the surname Yu jumped to his death from a dormitory balcony, after two weeks of exploitative conditions at an internship arranged by his vocational school at a Shenzhen electronics factory.

A final-year computer student from Hubei province, Yu was asked to do repetitive manual labor on assembly lines for 11 hours a day at 14 RMB an hour. Yu complained of exhaustion, and missed work mostly due to health reasons and with permission from his supervisor. However, he was still marked “truant,” and threatened with expulsion from school on the morning of his death.

According to national regulations, vocational school internships must be relevant to the student’s major. Students under 18 cannot be assigned overtime work and night shifts, and cannot earn less than 80 percent of regular workers’ probationperiod salary. But “it is common for vocational schools to violate the regulations,” wrote Yuan Yayang, a lawyer specializing in labor cases on social media platform Zhihu.