Apple CEO Tim Cook is currently on tour in China, and stopped off at the Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou to meet and greet the workers assembling the iPhone 6. It"s not clear what the purpose of the trip entails, but it may have something to do with a planned expansion of the current workforce, now numbered at 130,000 following an investigation by the Fair Labor Association in 2012 into worker violations. Foxconn employees across three factories in China were expected to work up to and exceeding 60 hours a week without overtime pay, a number which was scaled back to a maximum of 49 hours a week following the investigation.
Cook tweeted his satisfaction of the "talented people" he met that put together the iPhone 6, 6 Plus and other devices at the primarily Apple focused factory.
Cook toured the plant back in 2012 shortly after it opened, and now it is expected to expand its workforce up by another 170,000 workers to bring the total head count to 300,000. Although the timeframe for this expansion is unclear, it"s likely that Apple is looking to avoid future production delays like it faced with the iPhone 5s in 2013 at the same plant, when it switched from all production of the 5c.
Two weeks ago one thousand employees walked off the job for about four hours demanding higher pay after a recent increase in production and reduction in overtime at another Foxconn plant in southwest China.
Source WinFuture (German)