A worker fell to his death at Foxconn Technology Group’s manufacturing plant in southern China, local media reported on Wednesday, the latest in a series of apparent suicides by young migrant workers at its factory complexes in the past two years.
Foxconn makes the iPhone and other products for Apple and also counts Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and Sony Ericsson among its clients. It has criticised by labour rights groups for harsh labour practices.
The 21-year-old employee fell from the sixth floor of a factory dormitory in Shenzhen, the Chinese-language Hong Kong Economic Times reported. There were more than a dozen suicides at Foxconn last year.
The worker joined as an assistant last month and had total accumulated overtime of only two hours, so the death could not be related to work pressure, the newspaper quoted a senior company executive as saying.
After the suicides, Foxconn company pledged to improve work conditions, increase pay, reduce overtime and build a string of giant manufacturing complexes in inland provinces so many of its more than one million employees can live closer to their homes.
Foxconn Technology Group counts Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, Foxconn Technology and Foxconn International Holdings as its listed subsidiaries. – Reuters