Thousands of students in China are reporting that they are being forced to work on the highly anticipated new iPhone 5 after classes and internships were suspended. Officials are saying this is a “normal” practice. Can you guess what they’re being paid a month???? Find out below.
Students from Huai’an in Jiangsu Province were driven to a factory in the city run by Taiwan’s Foxconn Technology Company after the plant couldn’t find sufficient workers for the production of Apple’s much-anticipated iPhone 5, they said in online posts.
A student majoring in computing at the Huaiyin Institute of Technology said 200 students from her school had been driven to the factory.
They started work on the production line last Thursday and were being paid 1,550 yuan (US$243.97) a month for working six days a week, she said.
But they had to pay hundreds of yuan for food and accommodation, she said in an online post under the name of mengniuIQ84.
Several other students from at least five colleges backed up what she said, saying they were being forced to work for 12 hours a day.
Badly disrupted
A Jiangsu Institute of Finance and Economy student called Youyoyu said students from departments of law, English and management were all working at the plant.
A Huai’an University student posting under the name of Dalingzhuimengnan said Foxconn was badly in need of 10,000 workers but students were looking forward to returning to classrooms to continue their academic studies which had been seriously disrupted.
MengniuIQ84 wrote that the authorities had ordered the schools to send students to assist Foxconn but said that the factory neither informed parents nor signed agreements with students.
One or two schools had canceled their internship programs with Foxcon after media exposure and pressure from the public, she said, but her institute had no plans to do so and had even punished students who had tried to leave the factory.
