1,000 students faced with decision to manufacture Playstation 4 or not graduate (China)
Chinese vocational students have been forced to either work at a factory, manufacturing Sony's anticipated PlayStation 4 video game console, or not graduate, local news agencies reported Thursday.
A thousand students from Xian's Technological University North Institute of Information Engineering were required to participate in an internship program producing PS4 systems on an assembly line at the Taiwanese company Foxconn's Yantai vocational campus in faraway Shandong province, or else not receive six credits necessary to graduate, according to reports from the Chinese state newspaper China Daily and Hong Kong's Oriental Daily.
Foxconn said in a statement emailed to Al Jazeera that after an internal investigation, the company "determined that there have been a few instances where our policies pertaining to overtime and night shift work were not enforced." However, it did not confirm or deny allegations of students being coerced into working at its factory.
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"While we provide vocational schools with our qualification requirements and each of our campuses works directly with the schools in their province to carry out the program, it is the schools that recruit the students under the supervision of the relevant local government and the schools also assign teachers to accompany and monitor the students throughout their internship program," the statement said.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/10/chinese-studentsforcedtomanufactureplaystation4report.html
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