Students are main workforce for leading computer manufacturer
According to a Hong Kong non-profit group, some of world's main laptops are made by 16-year-old Chinese students working 12 hours a day. The company defines allegations as "untrue and unfair".
Hong Kong (AsiaNews/Agencies) – The world’s biggest laptop brands rely on Chinese student labourers as young as 16 to work 12-hour days on factory production lines, with their funding and graduation at risk if they fail to comply, a labour watchdog has claimed.
Students on vocational courses are recruited in their thousands to produce keyboards, assemble parts and fit screws during internships at Quanta Computer, a Taiwan-owned Fortune 500 company whose factories in China supply Apple, Acer, Hewlett-Packard and Sony, among many others.
If students refuse, they are told their funding will be cut or they will not receive their diploma, this according to a report by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom), a Hong Kong-based non-profit group.
Interns are believed to comprise about half of the workforce at Quanta’s Chongqing factory, where students’ three-month internships supply a steady flow of “cheap and disposable labour”, the report alleges.
Quanta operates three manufacturing plants in mainland China, in Shanghai, Changshu and Chongqing, from which it claims to supply each of the top ten PC companies and produce one-third of all PC laptops in the world.
“Quanta is cooperating with local vocational schools to arrange student interns to work in the factory,” a company manager said. “Student interns are good because they are flexible. It only takes a few weeks to order the students from the schools.”
Despite labour laws stipulating that interns should make up just 10 per cent of a facility’s workforce, the manager told undercover researchers that he estimated “more than 60 per cent” of the workers were interns.
For its part, Quanta Computer denied the report’s allegation, saying that “After internal verification, we believe that the allegations . . . are untrue and unfair to the company. There are serious mistakes in the information . . . from the ‘undercover investigators’.”
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