Dormitory Labour Regime In India's iPhone Factory: Report (image: Daniel Romero/Unsplash)

Negating all labour safety proceedings and wellbeing, an iPhone factory run by Foxconn in Tamil Nadu”s Sriperumbudur is exploiting women workers. Johanna Deeksha”s shocking report on Scroll.in titled “India’s iPhone Factory Is Keeping Women Workers Isolated” throws light on deprecating and illegal condition in which women workers dwell and abandoned. Good money lures young women into the workforce of this mobile manufacturing plant and leaves them under oppressive existence.

The Taiwanese company Foxconn is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of electronics. Though most of its mobile production was earlier were from China, due to recent strained relation between US and China, they shifted their location to Tamil Nadu.

In the factory most of workers are young women in the age group between 18 and 25. As per activists observation, women workers comprise 80 percent of factory”s workforce. Their job is to assemble iPhones. Though Foxconn bringing young and rural women to the workforce initiates change, the “hidden cost” is not explored much, Johanna Deeksha observes.

The factory facilitates hostels to women and strictly restricts their movements. “Activists say the constraints placed on the women who live in the hostels is just one of the many ways in which the company is exercising control over its workers – an aspect that is getting overlooked in the euphoria accompanying India’s iPhone push,” Johanna Deeksha writes. By jailing people they remain isolated, report adds.

For that purpose, Foxconn prefers internal migrants and offer the workers with hostels. The hostels are not just located distant, but the living conditions are dismal including low quality food, unhygienic surroundings and poor maintenance.

The “dormitory labour regime” is the name of the model of housing workers in hostels and system traces back to China. Foxconn seems to be replicating this model in India, the report states. In Andhra Pradesh, another state where Foxconn has presence also prevails the same dormitory system.

In Sriperumbudur, the contract agencies who recruit workers and Foxconn together to propose the dormitory arrangements. They manipulates the worry of the young women workers” parents and validates the restriction of movement. The dormitory system also enables them to cut their “any interaction with outside world”, especially with trade unions; meanwhile, the outside world has also no knowledge of these workers safety and wellbeing as well. As per the reports, the company is planning to cut off the house rent allowance which also leaves the workers no option except to stay in the hostels.

Besides, in the factory even in the eight-hour shifts there is no reliable routine for workers. “The women suffer from back aches and neck pains as a result of bending over the phones for hours at a stretch,” report adds. Except a 45-minute lunch break, toilet breaks in-between are also denied. Even those workers who find their own living arrangements find the terms of their employment oppressive. Furthermore, by only providing 11-month contracts to the workers, Foxconn bypasses a rule which gives protections to long-term contract workers by Tamil Nadu laws.

Meanwhile, Scroll in’s questions concerning the issue have been left unanswered by Foxconn.