Apple is betting big on India. Here's how that's playing out for workers in an iPhone factory in South India.
et back from a dusty highway in South India, three newly completed factory buildings rise up behind a black spiked iron fence. In their shadow, several yellow construction vehicles sit beside mounds of upturned soil and the skeleton of a half-built warehouse. On a May afternoon this year, a group of women in blue and pink uniforms hurried from one building to another over the din of traffic and construction.
Apple declined TIME’s request for a reporter to be given a tour of the Sriperumbudur factory for this story, and refused two requests to make a senior executive available for an interview. Foxconn did not respond to similar requests. In a statement, an Apple spokesperson said that the issues at the Sriperumbudur factory were addressed after the food-poisoning incident, and added that regular Apple audits have found that the conditions in the factory are continually improving.
Employees work on an assembly line in the mobile phone plant of Rising Stars Mobile India Pvt., a unit of Foxconn Technology Co., in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, India, on Friday, July 12, 2019.The Tamil Nadu inspector’s letter to Foxconn warned that “suitable action” would be taken against it within seven days, unless the company could explain why it “should not be prosecuted for the irregularities found” during the inspection.
Since the factory shut down and reopened, four current workers told TIME in May, it is generally a safer place to work. The same workers, however, complained of high production targets, as well as a system of subcontracting that in effect creates a two-tier workplace where a comparatively small number of Foxconn employees enjoy greater benefits and job security than a legion of temporary workers, hired by third-party Indian subcontractors, who also work inside the factory.
Meena is not employed directly by Foxconn. Instead, like many of her colleagues in the factory, she is employed by a third-party contractor. This system is not unique to Foxconn, according to Gopalakrishnan, the labor lawyer. It’s common in the Indian manufacturing sector, she says, because it helps factory owners maintain a flexible workforce to which they bear few legal obligations.
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