The Wall Street Journal reports that Hon Hai Precision (trade name Foxconn) has decided to raise all wages by an average of 20 percent. Discussions have reportedly been going on for a while now and though the decision to raise wages come at a time when the company is under a huge amount of scrutiny for how it treats employees, the company says the decision was not influenced by the current suicide cluster plaguing the factory.
"It is not because of the suicides," spokesman Edmund Ding said. "The discussion has been going on for a long time."
Mr. Ding went on to say that the company has authorized managers in different provinces to determine how much the raise should be. "It would be an average 20 percent increase, which means some areas will be more than 20 percent," Mr. Ding said, failing to mention that some of those increases would equally have to be lower than 20 percent to arrive at that average.
Hon Hai has yet to specify a date for the increases but Ding says, "it should be very soon."
Recent undercover reports into how workers at Foxconn are treated revealed that employees must sign a voluntary affidavit to waive the 36-hour legal limit on monthly overtime hours. Employees are willing to sign because without overtime, they cannot make a decent wage.
