Foxconn boosterism looking a little icky today

That Foxconn reportedly got caught making some Chinese high schoolers work illegal shifts comes as no surprise.

Foxconn has been caught doing this before with young workers, and so-called 'interns.'

"Work in general at Foxconn is extremely taxing, extremely monotonous and has an extremely high burnout rate," said Keegan Elmer, a researcher at the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin. 

The company has also been accused of undercutting minimum wage laws and benefits protections by hiring young "interns," some of them underage high school students, to work on production lines. 

In 2012, New York-based China Labor Watch found children as young as 14 were forced to work in Foxconn factories by technical colleges or they would not graduate. An audit of the company by the Fair Labor Association found that "in 2011, 2.7% of the workforce of Foxconn Group consisted of interns, an average of 27,000 interns per month." 

"Our assessors found that interns worked both overtime and night shifts, violations of the regulations governing internships," the report said.

In fact, some workers were committing suicide over harsh working conditions, and the company installed suicide prevention nets at company-built worker housing.

If you know of Foxconn, there’s a good chance it’s because you’ve heard of the suicides. In 2010, Longhua assembly-line workers began killing themselves. Worker after worker threw themselves off the towering dorm buildings, sometimes in broad daylight, in tragic displays of desperation – and in protest at the work conditions inside.  

here were 18 reported suicide attempts that year alone and 14 confirmed deaths. Twenty more workers were talked down by Foxconn officials.

All of which puts the comments of this pro-Foxconn Wisconsin business leader into its context, since humans are certainly part of the environment:  

The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce's Tim Sheehy tried hard in remarks to the Journal Sentinel to downplay concerns about the company's adherence to environmental law even though much Wisconsin environmental policy has been waived for Foxconn:

Sheehy said as an international company that supplies electronic giants such as Apple, Foxconn has management systems and standards in place that include substantial environmental controls. 

 “They want to go far beyond command and control,” he said. “In other words ‘here’s your law, we have to comply with it.’