The Chinese have a good reason to hate Amazon

Amidst ongoing allegations of brutal working conditions at Amazon (AMZN), US-based China Labor Watch has now attacked the e-commerce giant and its contract manufacturer Foxconn citing violation of all labor laws in China.  In the report filed after a nine-month investigation at the Foxconn unit in Hengyang – where Amazon’s Echo speakers and Kindle e-readers are manufactured – it was stated that the company demanded employees to work for over 100 hours as monthly overtime during the peak seasons.

This violated the Chinese labor law that limits overtime to 36 hours a month. Apart from the overtime, the workers used to report at their workstations 10 minutes prior to their working hours and were not being paid for this time. Quite similar to the concept of temporary staff in the US, the factory exceeded the limit for dispatch workers also.

US-based China Labor Watch has now attacked the e-commerce giant and its contract manufacturer Foxconn citing violation of all labor laws in China.

Amazon said it had identified these issues in a separate audit on Foxconn’s Hengyang factory that it completed in March and had requested Foxconn to come up with a corrective action plan.

Earlier, a series of employee suicides in 2010 over harsh working conditions had made Foxconn fix safety nets in factories and hire counselors. The manufacturer was blamed for having military-like working conditions, which employees found too difficult to cope with.

For quite some time now, Amazon has attracted widespread criticism for its bruising workplace conditions. While the company emerged as one of the largest public companies with market cap expected to touch $1 trillion this year, workers of this company are subjected to abusive working conditions right from timed toilet breaks, lower wages to being penalized for sick days.