Workers told SACOM researchers that they sometimes have to work very long hours till early morning, often 12 to 15 hours a day, and sometimes even up to 17 to 18 hours a day. In other words, the total amount of overtime hours can be up to 170 to 200 hours a month, which, in turn, means that workers have to work more than 360 hours a month. (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour 2014, 2)
Further issues at Pegatron included an unsafe and unhealthy working environment, illegal charges for health checks, insufficient health information, precarious dispatch labour, exclusion from social insurance, difficulties to resign from the job, scolding, fines, repressive management, and lack of trade unions. The report concludes:
Pegatron and its buyer Apple have continuously engaged in poor labour practices and abuses of workers’ rights. Even though the Apple Inc. has established its code of conducts since 2005, the working conditions in Apple’s supply chain are still far from satisfactory. This report, along with the earlier investigative reports released by SACOM throughout the years, have continuously demonstrated that Apple and its suppliers in the Chinese mainland have never treated their workers with dignity. (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour 2014, 21)
A 2014 BBC undercover report unveiled that workers assembling iPhones 6 in Pegatron factories are so overworked that they fall asleep during work and in their breaks.<sup>10</sup>
An ideology is a claim that does not correspond to reality. SACOM’s studies show that reality in the factories of Apple’s Chinese suppliers is different than reported in the company’s own reports. Apple tries to distort presentations of labour in its supply chain by ideology in order to forestall critique of capitalism.
The Foxconn example shows that the existence and usage of digital media not just depends on the labour of software engineers and content producers. Digital labour covers a broad range of labour working under different conditions, including slaveminers working in African conflict mines, smelters, hardware assemblers, software engineers, digital media content producers, eWaste workers, or users of commercial digital media (Fuchs 2014, 2015).
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10 Apple “failing to protect Chinese factory workers”. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30532463 BBC Online, accessed on 18 December 2014.