I need help with this essay

Life at Foxconn's suicide factory Undercover team reveals working conditions at China factory. -ST Wed, Jun 02, 2010. The Straits Times By Connie Er

They work, some on their feet throughout, up to 12 hours a day, six days a week, assembling products that most cannot afford to buy themselves: Apple iPhones, Apple iPads, Dell computers and Nokia mobile phones.

They are not allowed to talk while working and could be fined for doing so.

These are some of the conditions workers at Foxconn have to endure, according to an undercover team of seven Chinese who infiltrated the Longhua plant in southern China's Shenzhen boomtown two weeks ago, The Telegraph reported.

'Hundreds of people work in the workshops, but they are not allowed to talk to one another. If you talk, you get a black mark in your record and you get shouted at by your manager. You can also be fined,' investigator Zhu Guangbing, who organised the undercover operation, told London's The Telegraph. His team included netizen volunteers and four Foxconn workers.

Between 300,000 and 400,000 employees eat, work and sleep at Foxconn's plant, in Longhua Town, which some have labelled the IT Forbidden City due to its water-tight security.

'In the past three months, the factory has been losing 50,000 staff a month because workers are burning out,' Mr Zhu, a migrant worker and a workplace rights advocate, said. 'The workers are reduced to repeating exactly the same hand movement for months on end.'

The workers the team spoke to say that their hands continue to twitch at night, or that when they are walking down the street they cannot help but mimic the motion. They are never able to relax their minds, Mr Zhu, 36, said.

Overtime last year was an average of 120 hours per month per worker, above the maximum level set by Apple in its guidelines to suppliers, The Telegraph reported.

Amid the spate of suicides, the company has now reduced the time to 80 hours per month and Foxconn's parent company, Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry, the world's largest electronics contractor, plans to raise its basic wage of 900 yuan (S$185) a month by about 20 per cent.

On Thursday morning, a Foxconn employee tried to kill himself by slitting his wrist. He survived. His suicide attempt was the 13th by a young employee of Foxconn in Shenzhen this year. Ten died. A 19-year-old man jumped off Foxconn's dormitory building in Langfang, in northern China's Hebei province, in January. Most of the suicides reportedly involved workers who had been at the company for less than six months.

Mr Lin Fengxiang, a 23-year-old worker who came from a village in Guangdong, said: 'I know why all those people jumped. In here, nobody gives a damn about you.'

A Southern Weekend newspaper's undercover reporter, Mr Liu Zhiyi, 22, who worked for 28 days in the Longhua complex last month, said that 10 workers shared one dorm but many did not even know one another's name.

Workers are barred from taking personal belongings out of their dormitories unless they get signed permission, and can be sacked if they consistently fail to finish all the food on their plates in the canteen, the China Daily reported.

During a two-day course, trainees were constantly reminded by their instructor - former armed police officer Li Mengqiang - not to challenge his authority unless they dared to 'go against all security officers in Longhua'.

He was also told by a manager to punish any trainee caught sleeping or chatting during the training.

Five men who made mistakes while filling in their contract forms were threatened with expulsion, while those who took the wrong forms were charged 50 yuan for the right ones, the China Daily said.

Inside the Longhua compound which covers about 2.6 sq km, there are free swimming pools and tennis courts. Clubs offer activities such as chess, calligraphy, mountain climbing and fishing.

But workers said they do not have time to enjoy the facilities. 'The workers we spoke to said they have never used the swimming pools,' said Mr Zhu.

While experts and the authorities say the spate of suicides at Foxconn is more of a social problem than a reflection of conditions at its factories, relatives of victims place the blame squarely on Foxconn, Hong Kong's newspaper South China Morning Post reported.

'If there were frequent suicides at other factories, then it's a social problem and not Foxconn's fault. But look at what's happened in the past few months, how can Foxconn not bear the blame?' said Mr Liang Xiande, an uncle of 21-year-old Liang Chao, who died after falling from the seventh floor of a dormitory at the Longhua plant on May 14.

Mr Terry Gou, chairman of Hon Hai Precision, told the media that he could not sleep at night and dreaded answering his phone when he was not at work, fearing more news about suicides. He toured Foxconn's sprawling facilities in Shenzhen with reporters on Wednesday and vowed to take sweeping action to prevent more deaths.

Mr Gou, 59, is ranked No. 1 in Forbes' list of Taiwan's richest this year, with wealth of US$5.9 billion (S$8.3 billion) and is ranked No. 136 on Forbes' world's billionaires list. Mr Gou runs Hon Hai with the power of a warlord, The Wall Street Journal said, adding that at the centre of his empire is his walled Shenzhen Foxconn plant.

'I always tell employees: The group's benefit is more important than your personal benefit,' Mr Gou told the Journal in an interview three years ago.

Mr Gou himself is not unacquainted with grief. He lost his first wife Serena Lin and a younger brother to cancer in recent years.

The billionaire married dance instructor Delia Tseng, now 36, in 2008, after his first wife died in 2005. He had wooed Hong Kong actress Carina Lau in a brief dalliance in 2007.