SWEATSHOP SHOWDOWN
Women angered by poor conditions force change at Indian plant of iPhone maker. By Sudarshan Varadhan, A Ananthalakshmi and Ahmed Farhatha in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu
For the women who assembled iPhones at a Foxconn plant in southern India, crowded dormitories without flush toilets and food sometimes crawling with worms were problems to be endured for the paycheque. But when tainted food sickened over 250 of the workers their anger boiled over, culminating in a rare protest that shut down a plant where 17,000 people had been working.
A look by Reuters at the events before and after the Dec 17 protest casts a stark light on living and working conditions at Foxconn, a company central to Apple’s supply chain.
The tumult comes at a time when Apple is ramping up production of its iPhone 13 and shareholders are pushing the company to provide greater transparency about labour conditions at suppliers.
Reuters spoke to six women who worked at the Foxconn plant near Chennai. All of them requested they not be named because of fear of retaliation on the job or from police.
Workers slept on the floor in rooms, which housed between six and 30 women, five of these workers said. Two workers said the hostel they lived in had toilets without running water.
“People living in the hostels always had some illness or the other — skin allergies, chest pain, food poisoning,” another worker, a 21-year-old who quit the plant after the protest, told Reuters. Earlier food poisoning cases had involved one or two workers, she said.
“We didn’t make a big deal out of it because we thought it will be fixed. But now, it affected a lot of people.”
ON PROBATION
Apple and Foxconn said earlier this month that they found that some dormitories and dining rooms used for employees at the factory did not meet required standards. They pledged to take a number of steps to rectify problems.
Foxconn reopened the facility last Wednesday, and Apple said the plant would remain on probation, adding that it would continue monitoring conditions at the dormitories and dining halls, along with independent auditors.
Foxconn said: “We have implemented a range of corrective actions to ensure this cannot happen again and a rigorous monitoring system to ensure workers can raise any concerns they may have, including anonymously.”
The plant could take more than two months to resume full production, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
Laws governing housing for women workers in Tamil Nadu state call for each person to have at least 12 square metres of living space. Housing must also meet hygiene and fire safety standards as laid out by local authorities.
Foxconn said it was restructuring its local management team and taking immediate steps to improve facilities. All employees were being paid while it makes necessary improvements, the company said.
Venpa Staffing Services, a Foxconn contractor that runs the dorm where workers were sickened by food poisoning, declined to comment.
The food poisoning and subsequent protests have also led to investigations by at least four Tamil Nadu state agencies.
The state government said in a statement that it had asked Foxconn to ensure that working and living conditions were improved, including the quality of housing and drinking water.
Foxconn had told state officials that it had “ramped up production too quickly”, though production was curtailed during April and May when the Delta variant of Covid-19 was raging in India, a senior official from the state’s industries department told Reuters.
Taiwan-based Foxconn opened the plant in 2019 with the promise of creating up to 25,000 jobs, a boost to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” campaign.
Sriperumbudur, a town outside Chennai where the factory is situated, is a busy industrial area with factories that make Samsung and Daimler products nearby.
The factory is central to Apple’s efforts to shift production away from China due to tensions between Beijing and Washington. Reuters reported in 2020 that Foxconn planned to invest up to US$1 billion in the plant over three years.
Foxconn contracts out the staffing of the factory to labour brokers, who are also responsible for housing the workers — mostly women — employed there.
RATS AND POOR DRAINAGE
Following the protests on Dec 17, food safety inspectors visited the hostel where the food poisoning occurred and closed the kitchen after finding rats and poor drainage, said Jegadish Chandra Bose, a senior food safety officer in the Thiruvallur district where the hostel is located.
“The samples analysed did not meet the required safety standards,” he said.
The women who work at the Foxconn plant make 10,500 rupees ($140) a month and pay a contractor for housing and food while they work at the plant.
Most workers are aged between 18 and 22 and come from rural areas of Tamil Nadu. The monthly pay is more than a third higher than the minimum wage for such jobs, according to state government guidelines.
The 21-year-old worker who quit following the protest, told Reuters that her parents are farmers growing rice and sugarcane. She said she looked for a city job like many others in her village and considered the Foxconn wages good.
Several activists and academics said women recruited from farming villages to work in Sriperumbudur’s factories are seen by employers as less likely to unionise or demonstrate, a factor that made the protests at the Foxconn factory — which isn’t unionised — even more notable.
V Gajendran, assistant professor at the Madras School of Social Work in Chennai, said women recruited to work in nearby factories “typically come from larger, poor, rural families, which exposes them to exploitation and reduces their ability to unionise and fight for their rights”.
‘WE WERE ALARMED’
The food poisoning incident sent 159 women from one dorm to hospital on Dec 15, workers told Reuters. Another hundred women needed medical attention but were not hospitalised, the Thiruvallur district administration said.
A rumour — later proved to be false — circulated that some of the women had died. When some sick workers failed to show up for work at the factory two days later, others staged a protest when shifts were changing.
“We were alarmed and we talked among each other in the hostel and decided to protest. There was no one leader,” one of the workers told Reuters.
On Dec 17, about 2,000 women from the nearby hostels took to the streets, blocking a key highway nearby.
Male workers, including some from a nearby auto factory, joined a renewed protest the next day.
Police responded to the larger, second protest by striking the male workers and then chasing and striking some of the women involved, two workers and Sujata Mody, a local union leader who had interviewed workers, told Reuters.
Police detained 67 women workers and a local journalist, confiscated their phones, and called their parents with a warning to get their daughters in line, said three of those detained, local union leaders, and a lawyer who was trying to help those detained.
Reuters could not independently confirm the descriptions of the police response.
M Sudhakar, the top police official in Kancheepuram district, denied that protesters were beaten, phones were confiscated, or that workers were intimidated by police.
“We strictly adhered to guidelines and respected the rights of those who were detained. All rules were followed,” he told Reuters.
K Mohan, a village-level administrator who went to the hostel where the food poisoning incident occurred to investigate living conditions, found no safeguards to prevent Covid infections.
“The women were made to stay in the hostel where no coronavirus guidelines were being followed,” he told police in testimony reviewed by Reuters.
The unrest at Foxconn was the second involving an Apple supplier in India in a year. In December 2020, thousands of contract workers at a factory owned by Wistron Corp destroyed equipment and vehicles over the alleged non-payment of wages, causing estimated damage of $60 million.
Apple placed Wistron on probation and said it would not award the Taiwanese contract manufacturer new business until it addressed the way workers were treated.
At the time, Wistron said it had worked to raise standards and fix issues at the factory. Wistron restarted operations at the plant earlier in 2021. Apple had no immediate comment on Wistron’s status when asked by Reuters.
People living in the hostels always had some illness or the other — skin allergies, chest pain, food poisoning,” one young worker told Reuters