Digital Story Proposal

             Workers at Foxconn have endured less than ideal conditions in the Apple factories. Foxconn supports Apple, Sony, HP, Dell, Nintendo, Motorola, and Nokia. Mainly in the Apple factories, the workers put up with low wages and long hours under an inhumane and abusive management system. For my digital story, I will start by talking about the harsh realities that are Foxconn factories.

             The employees are being driven towards suicide so I will explain the reasons behind the suicides. First and foremost, the “employees are paid only $1.78 per hour.” (Mashable.com) While working they must have some place to live so they can rent out dorms for $17 a month. These are not your average double rooms however. The employees share the rooms with seven roommates. While on the job, the work is lengthy and difficult making the low wages not even comparable to what they deserve. To assemble a single iPad, it takes five days and three hundred seventy five pairs of hands. Employees are using chemicals and materials that may be harmful to be around such as raw aluminum amongst other metals. In one shift, an employee can carve the apple logo into aluminum three thousand times or make 150,000 iPad cameras. They do this by taking very short breaks or no breaks at all in their already long workday. Their shifts are twelve hours and they get two meal breaks. The meals are seventy cents for cafeteria-style meat and rice. Despite these horrible conditions, thousands of people line up for the job because they need some sort of income. Of the people that want the job, Foxconn hires eighty percent of those people, some of which are as young as thirteen.

            Due to all of the previous conditions, between 2010 and 2013, twenty-four people tried to kill themselves because of the circumstances. In that time period, there were three suicide attempts in three days all of which ended with death. All of the people who attempted suicide were under the age of twenty-six. One specific instance was a seventeen-year-old girl who attempted suicide in 2010. She is now paralyzed from the waist down. Another circumstance falls on July 16, 2009, which is the date of one of the very first suicides. A man lost an iPhone so employees with seniority beat him and searched his room. He jumped from his apartment building the next day. Clearly, this is not right and there is no coincidence in this situation. Next in my digital story, I am going to try to collect some footage from the actual factory workers or stories about them in order to portray to my audience the type of people that are working in the factories and the type of people that are ending their lives all for a job. By putting in little clips of the factory workers, it will strike the viewers heartstrings hopefully because it’s hard to watch something and think that the person in the video is so unhappy.

            Following the clips of real life Foxconn employees, I plan to elaborate on the improvements that Foxconn has made even though very little progress has been made. However, small changes have been made to alter the once unimaginable work place that was Foxconn. First, they announced, “No employee could work more than 49 hours a week”. (NY Times) Also, people working for Foxconn who were sixteen and seventeen have to work lighter jobs and cannot work at night. Regarding the suicides, all Foxconn has done is put a suicide net around the perimeter of their factories and dorm buildings. People consider this to be putting a bandage on the issue. I intend for my digital story to make people think about what else could be done to make working at Foxconn less miserable.

            The style of my digital story is going to be set up like a power point but the pictures are going to play as videos as a means of transitioning from topic to topic. My digital story will start with the horrible things that have happened to the employees at Foxconn then transition into what the employees did because of their circumstances at the factories. From there, I will talk about what Foxconn did to improve how the employees felt about the company. At the end, I plan to leave it somewhat open-ended in hopes that the audience can join in and offer some better solutions to help the employees at Foxconn.

  

Works Cited

"Improving Working Conditions at Foxconn." New York Times. New York Times

            Company, 26 Dec. 2012. Web. 7 Nov. 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com>

Kelly, Samantha Murphy. 10 Staggering Facts behind Apple's Foxconn Factory.

            Mashable. N.p., 22 Feb. 2012. Web. 7 Nov. 2013. <http://mashable.com>.