Marketplace reports that their Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz is the second reporter to ever gain access to the factory floor at the somewhat infamous Foxconn, Apple’s Chinese producer. Though there’s always news of Foxconn suicides, so much so that the phrase “Foxconn suicides” has its own Wikipedia page, the factory seems to do what it can to make the conditions bearable. As shown from the above video, the factory is spotlessly clean, and the campus even has athletic facilities for workers to unwind and exercise.
From a report released about a week earlier than the above video, Schmitz notes that Foxconn is more like a little town than it is a factory, as 240,000 people work at the factory, with around 50,000 of them living on the actual campus in dorm-like accommodations. The campus has a “main street” of sorts, which contains everything one would expect from a college’s main street, with cafes, banks, restaurants, a library, fast-food stores, grocery stores, and even a wedding photo shop. There are athletic facilities, such as tennis and basketball courts, as well as a soccer field, gym, and two large swimming pools. The campus even has its own fire department, radio station, and television news station.
However, though the campus might quickly look like a small college campus at first glance, the deeper one travels into the area, the more one realizes Foxconn is a factory — and one that dealt with a rash of suicides at that — as large factory buildings loom over everything, with large nets to prevent or catch any potential jumpers from attempting suicide.
Read more of Schmitz’s report on Foxconn here, but make sure to watch the above video, as a look inside Foxconn isn’t as common as one might think considering the regular glut of Foxconn news we run into.
(via Marketplace)
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