iPhone 12: inside China’s ‘iPhone City’, it’s full steam ahead to produce Apple’s new 5G handset
- Tech giant Foxconn is on a hiring spree, with one recruitment centre alone processing about 2,000 applications a day as migrants arrive en masse for a factory job making Apple’s iPhone 12
- At the world’s largest assembly plant for iPhones, many eager applicants arrive at dawn and are put to work on the assembly line that afternoon
Blue-collar applicants are arriving in droves at the world’s largest assembly centre for Apple iPhones, where staff says it takes just a few hours to turn a young, unskilled migrant worker from rural China into a production line operator.
A recruitment centre at the sprawling Foxconn factory in central China’s Zhengzhou city operates like a well-oiled machine, rapidly processing people and plugging them into Apple’s extensive global supply chain.
Outside such hiring centres, hundreds of eager jobseekers wait in line – many fresh off trains or buses, often with their luggage in tow – expecting that their first night will be spent in a factory dormitory.
The bar for getting a job is quite low, with able-bodied applicants between the ages of 16 and 48 likely to be accepted for work in what has long been dubbed “iPhone City”.
A young applicant in her early 20s says she has never worked in a factory, having been trained as a nurse in a vocational school. But she decided to apply for a Foxconn job “just for fun”.
“I’m just tired of being a nurse,” she says.