The world's largest contract electronics maker, Foxconn, owned by Taiwan-based Hon Hai has been accused of forcing employees to work long hours for meager salaries, where workers have to work under extreme stressful conditions. Past employees have complained that the management enforces military-style discipline and the assembly lines move so fast that workers act more like robots than humans.

To be fair to the company, the pressure is not of its own making. Clients like Apple place their orders for millions of pieces, virtually at the eleventh hour in order to beat product counterfeiters.

When the iPod was launched, Foxconn was given just 30 days to deliver the entire shipment, forcing it to impose extremely high production quotas on individual employees. And, what did Foxconn gain by it? $13 per handset that Apple retails for $499.

Production workers put in 12 hours of work each day with one day off a week and have to put in 120 hours of overtime each month although the Chinese labour laws permit only 36 hours. Apple's acceptable "Code of Conduct" limit for overtime for its suppliers is set at 60 hours.

Employees are not allowed to talk to each other while at work and are fined and shouted at by managers if caught talking.

Shocked by the series of suicides, Chairman Terry Gou apologised and bowed before 300 local and foreign media and promised to take measures to stop them.

"I am very concerned about this. I can't sleep every night. From a scientific point of view, I'm not confident we can stop every case. But, as a responsible employer, we have to take up the responsibility of preventing as many as we can," he said.

Foxconn has now reduced the overtime to 80 hours per month, and is raising the basic wages of its employees by 50 to 100 per cent.

It is also planning of playing soothing music inside the assembly lines at the factory and establishing a suicide hotline.

It had called in a contractor last week and installed safety nets around the many factory buildings and dormitories so that workers, will still be saved by the protective nets below, if they jump from a high floor.

Foxconn recently asked all its employees to sign a memo promising never to hurt themselves or others in an extreme manner. When questioned about it by the media, Gou said that he had already rejected the proposal.

Nearly all of Foxconn's clients like Nintendo, Apple, Sony, Hewlett Packard, and Dell have launched investigations into the working conditions and labour practices at the company.

Foxconn's dilemma:
Foxconn employs 800,000 people in China and a vast majority of these workers come from rural China, who find it difficult to adapt to a city lifestyle as well as the speed at which Foxconn works in order to cope with the demanding delivery time lines imposed on it by their customers.

To be fair to the company, the pressure is not f its own making. Clients like Apple place their orders for millions of pieces, virtually at the eleventh hour in order to beat product counterfeiters. When the iPod was launched, Foxconn was given just 30 days to deliver the entire shipment, forcing it to impose extremely high production quotas on individual employees. And, what did Foxconn gain by it? $13 per handset that Apple retails for $499.

No wonder mass production units like Foxconn have earned the sobriquet of "sweatshops."

In China, as elsewhere in Asia, family time is of extreme importance, but these workers, a majority of them aged below 24, find it difficult to cope working like a robot with some workers just fixing two screws to some panel of a computer by the hundreds for more than 12 hours each day, leaving them little time to catch up with friends or even talk to their families back home.

In fact, it is said that a worker has no time to make friends with his or her fellow mates staying in the same room at the dormitory.

Despite this, Foxconn claims that nearly 8,000 people apply for jobs daily to work at the factory.

Foxconn's dilemma is finding a way to blend the rural mindset of its employees with the fast track new world of technology.

The company is planning to make available in house psychiatrists for its workers as well as deploy volunteers specialised in suicide prevention. It is also mulling to open plants in the countryside, so as to be closer to their employee's homes, where they could visit their families on weekends. (See: Foxconn to raise employees wages amid spate of suicides)