Teaching Foxconn the dignity of labour

Taiwanese company Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronic maker, is not new to charges of using discriminatory recruitment practices and workplace exploitation. The controversy has erupted again, this time in respect of the company’s Tamil Nadu plant, after an exhaustive Reuters report showed Foxconn had been deliberately excluding married women from its workforce.

The Reuters investigation, carried out over several months, revealed Foxconn had a deliberate but unwritten code that excluded married women from jobs at the iPhone assembly plant in Sriperumbudur. The company’s rationale, revealed by those interviewed, was that married women are less productive because of family responsibilities like “they have babies after marriage”!