The world's biggest technology companies are failing to stamp out child labour and abusive working conditions in their Chinese factories despite repeated accounts of human rights violations.
Recent reports reveal our insatiable lust for the latest gadgets is having a shocking impact on workers in countries such as China, who are being made to work more than 80 hours a week in sweatshop conditions for as little as 52 cents an hour.
Human rights group the National Labor Committee (NLC) released a report this week saying KYE, a factory in Guangdong province that supplies Microsoft, recruits hundreds of "work study students" aged 16 and 17, who work 15-hour shifts, six and seven days a week.
The report, produced after a three-year investigation, found workers were treated like prisoners and share primitive dorm rooms, sleeping on small plywood planks and having to buy their own food and mattresses.
It even alleged sexual harassment of female workers by security guards.
In March, Apple said at least 11 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories that supply the company. It also revealed that at least 55 of the 102 factories that produce its goods were ignoring Apple's rule that staff cannot work more than 60 hours a week.
It said it had rectified the issue and conducted a complete analysis of hiring processes.
But the Telegraph.co.uk Shanghai correspondent, Malcolm Moore, reported this month that an 18-year-old female worker at the Foxconn factory that produces iPads became the fourth person in as many weeks to attempt suicide by jumping from one of the factory's buildings.
In its report on the KYE factory, the NLC said that, in 2007 and 2008, before the recession, "workers were at the factory 97 hours a week while working 80-and-a-half hours".
"In 2009, workers report being at the factory 83 hours a week, while working 68 hours," the NLC said.
It said workers were paid 65 cents an hour, "which falls to a take-home wage of 52 cents after deductions for factory food".
The report found that the workers had no rights and were prohibited from talking, listening to music or using the bathroom during work hours. Workers who made mistakes were forced to clean the bathrooms.
One worker told the NLC that they were treated "like prisoners".
"It seems like we live only to work. We do not work to live. We do not live a life, only work," the worker said.
The factory makes computer mice for Microsoft and products for companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy, Samsung, Foxconn, Acer, Logitech and Asus.
But the report found that Microsoft accounts for 30 per cent of the factory's business and that workers were required to make 2000 mice for the company per shift.
Microsoft said in a statement that it was taking the claims "seriously" and vowed to "take appropriate remedial measures".
It comes after a Chinese factory worker committed suicide in July last year after reporting an iPhone prototype missing. The worker, Sun Danyong, 25, was so scared of the wrath of his bosses and Apple that he committed suicide by jumping out of a 12th-floor window.
Sun's family was paid $US44,000 in compensation - and his girlfriend reportedly got a free Apple laptop - after family and friends reported that Sun told them he was beaten and humiliated by his superiors while being interrogated over the missing phone. The factory owner, Foxconn, denied the claims.
In 2006, the technology world was shocked when Britain's Daily Mail published photographs and details of the harsh working conditions in the Chinese factories where iPods are made.
One, owned by Foxconn and located in Longhua, housed 100 low-paid workers per dorm room with all visits from people outside the plant barred.
A worker told the paper: "It's like being in the army. They make us stand still for hours. If we move we are punished by being made to stand still for longer."
Apple, Microsoft Slave Labour Claims
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that's the problem with modern labour markets based on contracts and outsourcing - the people don't even work for Apple or Microspoft, they work for 3rd party contractors who only retain the contract if they can keep costs to a bare minimum. It's a shame that the human cost of the consumer culture is so high. I often think that if more people understood the relationship between slave labour conditions in the 3rd world and cheap shiny stuff here in the west then as a society we would demand less shiny stuff. There are very few people who are inhumane enough not to care about the suffering of others the problem is that so many people just don't realise how interconnected everything is in the globalised economy.
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