Read Of The Ongoing Mistreatment Of The Man Who Blew The Whistle On Child Labor, In Chinese Amazon Assembly Facilities...

This popped up in my feed, almost immediately after I wrote my last one, below -- so we will cover it. . . now. [A new Merck story up next.]

Even in China, it is unlawful to force teenagers at 16 or under, to work more than 10 hours a day, or weekends or late nights.

But Tang Mingfang saw it, day after day, month after month. Here's the story, from FT:

. . .Early each summer, the bus began to fill with teenagers. Tang Mingfang, a 40-year-old office manager, watched as his shuttle from the workers’ dormitories to Foxconn Hengyang, an Amazon supplier factory in southern China, grew more crowded with kids brought in to assemble Kindle ebooks and Echo speakers for Christmas. By the peak of the production cycle, there were so many that Tang was unable to squeeze on to the bus. Sent by their vocational schools, the students arrived by the hundreds, as part of an arrangement with Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant that operates the plant.

An exclusive assembler of many Apple and Amazon products, Foxconn is China’s biggest private employer, with more than 700,000 workers. But during Chinese factories’ busiest periods, it’s common to see students from age 16 being bussed in to meet the higher demand for products. Once they reached the Hengyang factory, their task was to put together electronic devices often for up to 10 hours per day. Not that the students had much choice. If they said no, their teachers could refuse to let them graduate. . . .

One day he heard from colleagues about a vocational schoolteacher berating a crying student at the plant. Assembly-line managers didn’t discipline the students directly, instead complaining to the teachers. This instructor had been yelling and pulling the boy by the ear. Tang thought of his own young son, about to start primary school. What if his teachers treated him like that? I wouldn’t accept it. I couldn’t accept it, Tang thought. In the spring of 2019, assuming he understood the possible consequences, he decided to speak out. . . .

The rest, as they say, is history (and yes, Apple was guilty, too -- both were, and are, huge Foxconn clients). Do go read it all. Onward, into the morning's brisk sunshine.

नमस्ते