The latest little rumpus about student labour in China concerns students at a college who were told to go off and help Foxconn assemble the upcoming
The story is here:
If reports in the Chinese press are to be believed, Sony’s next-gen games console may be being assembled using some very outdated labor practices. According to Hong Kong’s Oriental Daily, thousands of students from an IT engineering program at the Xi’an Institute of Technology are being forced to work at Foxconn’s Yantai plant assembling the Sony Playstation 4. Students have been told if they refuse to participate, they lose six course credits, which effectively means they will not be able to graduate.
Officially, the program is considered an “internship” and it is publicly recognized and promoted by the school.
Part of the outrage seems to be directed at that "forced". Which rather surprises me: for as I say there are plenty of training programs that insist that you must have work experience to go alongside the academic studies. In my native England we call such university degrees "sandwich courses" where you do perhaps 3 years at the university and one year working in industry. There's also a vast panoply of vocational training programs that operate in a similar manner. In my youth they were called City and Guilds but now are more likely to be called NVQs. You want to train as a chef (as my brother did) then you're at the technical college for one or two days a week and then working in a commercial kitchen another three or four days.
This is all entirely apart from the American system of internship which is a couple of weeks (or now, months!) of unpaid labour to get inside an organisation. This is simply how vocational training is done in many parts of the world. Sure, it's great that you're doing the academic stuff. But the courses you've chosen, the area you're studying, means that you need practical exposure to how things are actually done in the real world as well.
The particular institute under discussion, Xi'An, does indeed have a series of vocational courses:
The Faculty of High Vocational Education of Xi'an University of Technology is located near to Yuxiang Gate of the ancient city wall of Xi'an, the start of the Silk Road and it has a 50-year history for technical vocation education. The tenet of this faculty is “Cultivate Practical Intellectuals for the Manufacture's and Management and Offer Technical Training Programs”. The Faculty of High Vocational Education now offers 16 training programs including computer application, mechanical mould, and numerical control technology. It consists of 4 departments: the Department of Information & Controlling Engineering, Machinery & Electronic Engineering, Computer Science, and Humanities & Management. This faculty also has 31 laboratories or training centers, 20 off-campus practice bases, 1 electromechanical training center with a maximum capacity of 400 students.
It doesn't sound beyond the bounds of possibility that such a school would have a requirement for for credit experience of the real world of computer manufacturing and engineering does it?
We then get to the second thing that seems to be causing outrage:
Foxconn told Quartz that after an internal investigation it determined that the XIT students at its Yantai factory complex were assigned to night shifts and overtime, in violation of the company’s policies. “Immediate actions have been taken to bring that campus into full compliance with our code and policies,” the company said in a statement, including “reinforcing the policies of no overtime and no night shifts for student interns, even though such work is voluntary, and reminding all interns of their rights to terminate their participation in the program at any time.”
Foxconn maintains similar internship programs “at many locations” in China, the company added, to provide students “with the opportunity to gain practical work experience and on-the-job training that will support their efforts to find employment following their graduation.”
Perhaps it's right that students shouldn't have to work at night: I'm not sure. I certainly did when I was a student. And if people are training up to join a field that works on 24 hour cycles then I would rather assume that at least some night work would be a good training. But if the system says they shouldn't then of course that's the law and therefore they shouldn't.
However, there is something that rather gets me about this and similar stories (like much of what comes out of China Labor Watch these days). Which is that we're pretty much talking about trivia in all of them. Here we're told that people doing computer manufacturing training have to go and work on a computer manufacturing line as part of the credit for their graduation. While they do this they are treated as and paid just like all of the workers on the line.
Since when has this sort of thing been an outrage anywhere? And much more importantly, given that only 35 years ago the Chinese economy was pretty much a howling wasteland with no one earning anything above subsistence for their labour, aren't we getting things a little out of perspective here? It is precisely and exactly these factories, the industrial revolution that they represent, which has led to this increase in wealth and income of course.
I'm not quite saying that we should be thanking the factory owners here, but not having a heart attack over what we'd regard as fairly normal behaviour in our own much richer economies might be useful.
