(Financial Times) -- 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.
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