
Foxconn plans Chinese union vote - barredo
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/48091254-6c3e-11e2-b774-00144feab49a.html
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barredo
Firewalled! Sorry. Here's the text.

Foxconn, the contract manufacturer whose biggest customer is Apple, is
preparing genuinely representative labour union elections in its factories in
China for the first time, a powerful sign of the changes in the workshop of
the world demanded by an increasingly restive workforce.

This would be the first such exercise at a large company in China, where
labour unions have traditionally been controlled by management and local
government. Foxconn is the country’s largest private sector employer with 1.2m
mainland workers.

The Taiwanese company, the world’s largest contract maker of electronics, said
that the new election process would see a larger representation of junior
employees and no management involvement.

“The position of chairman and 20 committee members of the Foxconn Federation
of Labour Unions Committee will be determined through elections once every
five years through an anonymous ballot voting process,” Foxconn said in
response to questions from the Financial Times.

The move is part of Foxconn’s attempts to tweak its manufacturing machine,
which makes a large proportion of the world’s gadgets such as iPhones, tablets
and computers, in response to frequent worker protests, riots, strikes and
soaring labour costs. Beijing is also encouraging collective bargaining as a
way to help contain the growing unrest.

Since a wave of worker suicides at the company’s Chinese plants in 2009 and
2010, its treatment of its huge workforce has attracted intense scrutiny.
Foxconn has become a focus for criticism of practices widespread in Chinese
factories including illegal overtime, low pay and the use of underage workers.

Apple reacted by bringing in the Fair Labor Association, a US-based labour
group, for an audit of some of the manufacturer’s largest plants. One of the
issues pinpointed by the FLA was the union’s failure truly to represent
workers.

After the Lunar New Year holiday this month, Foxconn, with the help of the
FLA, will begin training its Chinese workers in how to vote for their
representatives. They will be choosing up to 18,000 union committees whose
terms expire this year and in 2014, according to three people familiar with
the situation. Since the unions have so far had no real role in addressing
worker grievances and have been dominated by management, most young workers
know nothing about what a real labour union is supposed to do.

Foxconn said more than 70 per cent of the 188 employee-elected representatives
at its Shenzhen campus were frontline workers. However, sources familiar with
the matter said workers have historically had little say in the committees
that run the union.

“The process through which Foxconn’s current labour union representatives were
chosen was not democratic because there was no open and transparent nomination
of candidates, and it is not representative because more than half of the
committee members are from management,” said one person working on the
election plans. The chairman of Foxconn’s labour union in China, Chen Peng, is
the former head of the office of Terry Gou, the company’s founder and chief
executive. People familiar with the company described Ms Peng, who uses the
English name Peggy, as a key confidante of Mr Gou and a trusted member of the
management team in China.

