“i” Is for Interns

Now that Apple is putting the finishing touches on the most anticipated smartphone in history, Chinese students are again being pressed into service on the factory line inside the single largest internship program in the world.

This according to two separate stories in the Chinese press. A report today in the Shanghai Daily says that hundreds of students in the city of Huai’an were forced to help fulfill iPhone 5 orders starting last Thursday. Classes in town had allegedly been interrupted as a result, since the two-month long internships would fulfill the students’ need to “experience working conditions.”

One Weibo user quoted in the article, mengiuIQ84, said that she and 200 of her classmates from the Huaiyin Institute of Technology were bussed to a Foxconn factory to work on the assembly line, where they were told they would be paid $244 (RMB1,550) per month for her work, food and accommodation not included. Students at at least five other universities backed up her claims; some said they were working 12 hours a day. According to an article in the mainland First Financial Daily, some students appear to have returned to their schools, possibly because of growing publicity about the internship.

Read the rest over at Motherboard.