Workers in Chinese Foxconn factory reveal ‘life of hell’ producing iPhone 5

Beijing - Workers in Foxconn’s Chinese factories work on a 14-hour shift to assemble a iPhone 5 every 30 seconds and earn less than 60 pounds a week.

The horrific human cost of producing the phone has been exposed at Foxconn in Taiyuan, northern China by the Sunday Mirror.

The investigation revealed that low-paid factory staff have been given targets of producing one gadget every 30 seconds, 1000 a day, or be sacked.

They said that the exhausting workload is so high that they are banned from talking to one another during production, and even have paid fines for visiting the toilet more than three times in the grueling shift hours.

The take-home salary adds up to just 230 pounds a month, the paper said.

Humiliation begins at the factory gates, where workers have to walk through a barrage of metal detectors and are subjected to a full-body search, it added.

A handset passes through the workers hand every 30 seconds. In the three months up to the launch 180,000 passed through the hands of one worker, it found.

A worker quoted by the paper said that being more than 20 minutes away from their workstation results in a worker’s pay being deducted.

Exploitation has led to such ill-feeling that, two weeks ago, the plant was hit by a riot which forced it to shut for a day and left 40 injured.

There is also a history of troubles at Foxconn. Two years ago 13 workers jumped to their deaths under pressure of producing the then-new iPad, the report added.