Foxconn says emergencies are over
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Taiwan electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn on Wednesday announced the end of its "emergency status" to prevent the suicide attempts of its employees at mainland factories after workers staged rallies at its major industrial parks.
"Our efforts have prevented all suicide attempts in Shenzhen for almost three months," Terry Cheng, vice-president of Foxconn Technology Group, said at a news conference. "It's time for us to put an end to the emergency status and get back to normal management."
The company had witnessed a string of suicides, which resulted in 10 deaths and three injured, dated to the end of May this year, at its mammoth factories in Shenzhen, which are home to about 450,000 workers from different areas of the country.
Cheng, who has been fully involved to cope with the "biggest risk" in the history of the company, admitted that the company could have done better to prevent the suicide attempts, rather than the previous gesture that "we have tried our best".
"We were not professional and did not provide enough solutions, human resources and funds," he told reporters.
Apart from building about 3 million sq m of safety nets on buildings in all of Foxconn's industrial parks, the company announced two raises since early June, more than doubling the basic worker pay to 2,000 yuan ($293) a month at the Shenzhen compound.
Also, the company has decided to cut the total overtime hours from the previous 80 hours a month, to 36 hours as required by Chinese law. This figure is in line with the global industrial guideline, according to Cheng.
Given the new arrangement and extra industrial parks in China, the total employees at Foxconn will possibly increase to more than 1.3 million from the current 920,000.
But in the Shenzhen factories, the number of workers would be cut to about 300,000 to 350,000 from the current 450,000 and it would be developed into a research and development hub, and the logistics center of Foxconn, he added.
More than 60,000 workers of Foxconn around China joined rallies yesterday, which were titled "Treasure Your Life, Love Your Family, Care for Each Other to Build a Wonderful Future."
A similar gathering was held on Monday at Foxconn's campus in the northern city of Taiyuan, which employs about 60,000 workers. A Foxconn official in Taipei said the company decided that day to remove safety nets from the Taiyuan plant, although there are no plans to do the same at its other factories.
