Nokia refutes NGO claims of poor treatment of Chinese workers

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The Finnish mobile telephone manufacturer Nokia refutes criticism from two Finnish non-governmental organisations that the company mistreats its workers at a factory in Southern China.
      According to a report made public on Thursday, Nokia's factory in Dongguan in Southern China compels its employees to do more than the legal maximum of overtime work, and pays its workers less than the minimum wage.
      "We obey the law and working hour legislation", insists Martin Sandelin, Senior Vice President of Nokia Corporate Marketing.
      Workers at the factory have a 40-hour working week, and a maximum of 48 hours with overtime.
     
Sandelin also says that Nokia pays well over the Chinese minimum wage. When the NGO report was drafted last spring, the minimum wage in the Dongguan region was 450 yuan, or just over 40 euros a month.
      At the Nokia factory the minimum wage for temporary workers is 700 yuan (EUR 60) a month, and for employees with fixed contracts it is 900 yuan (EUR 80).
      By Finnish standards the Chinese wage is quite modest: Finnish workers doing equivalent work earn more in a day than the Chinese get in a month. On the other hand, most of the workers at the factory are young men and women from rural areas who earn more at the factory than they would doing agricultural work at home.
     
On Thursday, the NGOs Finnwatch and the Finnish ECA (Export Credit Agency) Reform Campaign presented a study in Helsinki that the organisations had commissioned, concerning Nokia and its subcontractors operating in Southern China.
      The research was conducted done by the Chinese ICO Research Institute, which interviewed 61 people working for Nokia and its subcontractors. In addition to Nokia, ICO investigated the activities of the Finnish companies Perlos and Salcomp, as well as the Taiwanese Foxconn and the Chinese BYD.
      The only factory that the investigators were allowed to visit was the Perlos plant in Guangzhou.
      The report found that temp workers in factories were in the weakest position; their pay and terms of employment were worse than among regular employees.
      Just under half of the workers at Nokia's Dongguan factory are temp workers. Sandelin says that Nokia seeks to follow the principle of the same pay for the same work for both its regular employees and temp workers.
     
Originally the NGOs did not want to include Nokia in the study, as they were more interested in how the subcontracting chain operates. However, the organisations' Chinese partner ICO wanted to include the Nokia plant for its own reasons.
      Workers reported that conditions at the Nokia factory were better in many ways than in other factories. According to employee reports, violations of labour rules and legislation were worst at the Foxconn factory in Schenzen, which employs 70,000 workers. At Foxconn, workers have only one day off every three weeks.
     
Tove Selin, head of the ECA Reform Campaign, said that the results of the study confirmed the campaign's suspicions. Factory workers work long hours, working conditions are faulty, and the living conditions of some of the workers are inhumane. She says that such problems also exist in factories under Finnish ownership.
      Liu Kaiming of ICO says that the main reason for the problems is that the Chinese workers at the factories do not know their legal rights. For instance, Liu says that most of the workers are unaware that they have the legal right to organise trade unions. Speaking at a press conference in Helsinki on Thursday, Liu said that Nokia should encourage its workers to organise.
      The ICO representative would not say if the factories should set up local organisations of China's official trade union movement, or if they should form independent trade unions.
     
Martin Sandelin insists that the local trade union does operate at Nokia's Dongguan factory, and that Nokia helps finance the operations by paying the union two percent of the factory's payroll costs.
      In the conclusions of their report, the organisations urge Nokia to ascertain whether or not its subcontractors follow the principles of their code of conduct. Earlier reports indicate that workers are treated well in large Western companies, but that adherence to the rules gets weaker, the further down the subcontracting chain the factories move.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Nokia celebrates two decades in China - company expects further growth (24.2.2005)

Links:
  Finnwatch
  Finnish NGO Campaign to Reform the Export Credit Agencies

Helsingin Sanomat