Foxconn Audit Reveals Workweek Still Too Long

The auditors, supervised by the Fair Labor Association, said Foxconn was still working toward lowering the average workweek to the 49-hour cap. And labor unions at the plants that are supposed to represent the workers’ interests are still dominated by management, the group said.

Still, the average workweek has come down sharply from the typical 60 hours or more that has been common practice at the Chinese suppliers of Apple and other technology companies.

Although the auditors declined to be specific about the length of the Foxconn workweek, Apple has said that it has been working to reduce the long hours put in by workers at its suppliers, which are mostly in China.

In a statement on its supplier responsibility Web site, the company said for more than a million workers in its global supply network that it tracked in 2012, “the average hours worked per week was under 50.”

An Apple spokesman, Steve Dowling, declined to discuss the specifics of the Fair Labor Association audit, which he said was done independently of Apple. In a statement, Foxconn said the F.L.A. report confirmed the company’s recent improvements in its operations. “We will continue to build on that success as we work toward compliance with the F.L.A. Code,” the company said.

But Mr. Dowling said Apple has been working closely with its suppliers and conducting its own monitoring to improve conditions at the factories that make its products, and the company has posted public progress reports.

Foxconn, part of the Taiwan-based company Hon Hai Precision Industry, employs about 178,000 workers at the three factories inspected. It has about 1.2 million workers at plants making products for Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Microsoft and other technology companies.

Foxconn has been under intense scrutiny for several years because of working conditions inside its factories. Investigations by The New York Times, outside groups and Apple’s own supplier responsibility officials have found illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers and improper disposal of hazardous waste. Industrial accidents have injured and killed Foxconn workers, and the company also experienced a wave of worker suicides.

Labor and consumer activists have pressured Apple, one of the most profitable companies in the world, to do more to improve conditions for the people who make its products. The monthly earnings of Foxconn workers making Apple products are currently about $500.

Apple joined the Fair Labor Association, or F.L.A., in January 2012, and asked the group to audit its suppliers, beginning with Foxconn. The labor group has periodically inspected Foxconn factories in Guanlan, Longhua and Chengdu since February 2012 and interviewed thousands of workers. Apple pays for the audits.

After the first inspection, Apple and Foxconn agreed to an action plan of 360 items to be completed by July 1, 2013. As of January, 98.3 percent of them had been achieved, the group’s report said.

Most of the items were “housekeeping issues,” said Auret van Heerden, chief executive of the F.L.A., in an interview Thursday. “Those things they plowed through.”

But Foxconn has also addressed more substantive problems, Mr. van Heerden said. For example, in fire safety, the company added more escape routes and cleared choke points after the auditors asked it to test the evacuation of buildings during shift change, when plants are most crowded. “We were, in a way, looking for trouble,” he said.

He noted that Foxconn has also overhauled many processes, including using robots instead of people to polish the aluminum backs of iPad cases and water to capture and dispose of the resulting dust. An aluminum dust explosion in May 2011 at Foxconn’s Chengdu factory killed three workers and injured more than a dozen others.

Critics of the F.L.A. and Foxconn said the most recent audit played down problems found by other investigators, such as unpaid overtime and Foxconn’s use of unpaid interns.

“Over all, the F.L.A.’s reporting on Foxconn continues to be unjustifiably rosy,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, a university-backed group that monitors apparel factories worldwide, said in an e-mail.

Steven Greenhouse contributed reporting.

Foxconn Profit Surges in Third Quarter

TAIPEI — Shares of Hon Hai Precision Industry of Taiwan jumped Wednesday after Hon Hai, the main manufacturer of Apple products, posted a sharp increase in quarterly net profit, lifted by Apple’s new products.

But strong early gains were later tempered by investors’ caution about Apple’s prospects for long-term growth, analysts said.

Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn, the assembler of both the iPhone 5 and the iPad mini, started mass production for the products in late August. Hon Hai also provides electronics to other companies, including Cisco, Dell, Nokia and Sony.

The company reported late Tuesday a nine-month profit through September of 57.8 billion Taiwan dollars, or $1.98 billion, 24 percent higher than in the same period a year earlier.

Net profit in the July-to-September period was 30.3 billion dollars, according to Reuters and analysts’ calculations, up 58 percent from a year earlier. Profits in the quarter were 140 percent higher than in the previous three months.

Hon Hai said in a brief statement that it had achieved a notable market share gain “in the midst of the European-led global economic uncertainty and potential industry shrinkage.” It did not give further details in a statement late Tuesday to the Taiwan stock exchange or in a subsequent statement Wednesday.

Shares of Hon Hai finished Wednesday up 0.7 percent after quickly rising 3.4 percent at the opening of trading.

“The rise we saw this morning was not much, given the strong Q3 figures; in fact many foreign investors have been selling Hon Hai shares recently,” said Vincent Chen, an analyst at Yuanta Securities. “Many foreign investors who bought Hon Hai were buying into Apple’s future, but they’re now showing concerns over Apple’s growth.”

Last week, Apple delivered a second consecutive quarter of disappointing results and iPad sales fell well short of Wall Street’s targets, but investors said they would focus on the year-end holiday quarter.

Analysts have generally expected Hon Hai’s shipments to Apple to increase in the fourth quarter as the production of the iPhone 5 and the iPad Mini becomes more efficient than in the initial production period.

Hon Hai’s results in the third quarter were also helped by higher subsidies from Apple and a reversed charge of 4.5 billion dollars from investment in Sharp. Hon Hai had agreed to buy 9.9 percent of Sharp in March, but said in August that the two companies had agreed Hon Hai did not have to honor the purchase deal because Sharp’s shares had plunged after the March agreement.

Although neither Apple nor Foxconn has said what the cost-sharing arrangements, if any, are between the two companies, some analysts assumed that Apple was paying higher fees for the iPhone 5 and also covering part of the cost of rising wages.

Foxconn Technology Group, the trading name of Hon Hai, announced in mid-February that it had raised wages for workers in a range of 16 percent to 25 percent. In late March, it reached an agreement with Apple to hire tens of thousands of new workers to reduce overtime work as it fought perceptions that its plants in China were sweatshops.

“Foxconn’s margin improved owing to Apple’s subsidies,” said Mr. Chen, the analyst at Yuanta Securities, “but the subsidy level is hard to predict in nature and it may vary each quarter.”

In a trading note, Kirk Yang, an analyst with Barclays Capital, said he expected fourth-quarter consolidated sales to grow 14 percent from the level of a year ago because of strong shipments of Apple products.

Taiwan trims outlook

Taiwan cut its growth forecast for 2012 for a ninth time in a year Wednesday as Europe’s problems, concerns about the U.S. economy and mainland China’s slowdown kept third-quarter growth below forecasts, but bright spots indicated the economy might have bottomed out, Reuters reported in Taipei.

The economy grew a preliminary 1.02 percent in the third quarter of 2012 from the same time the previous year, the statistics agency said in a preliminary reading, below the median forecast in a Reuters poll for 1.55 percent growth. But the agency cut its full-year forecast to 1.05 percent from 1.66 percent.

Foxconn Riot Underscores Labor Rift in China

The online postings were from a disturbance late Sunday that shut down a manufacturing facility in Taiyuan in north China, where 79,000 workers were employed.

State-run news media said 5,000 police officers had to be called in to quell a riot that began as a dispute involving a group of workers and security guards at a factory dormitory.

The unrest was noteworthy because the factory site is managed by Foxconn Technology, one of the world’s biggest electronics manufacturers and an important supplier to companies like Apple, Dell, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

A spokesman for Foxconn said the company was investigating the cause of the incident. But analysts say worker unrest in China has grown more common because workers are more aware of their rights, and yet have few outlets to challenge or negotiate with their employers.

When they do, though, the results can be ugly and, because of social media and the Web, almost instantly transmitted to the world in their rawest and most unfiltered form.

“At first it was a conflict between the security guards and some workers,” said a man who was reached by telephone after he posted images online. The man said he was a Foxconn employee. “But I think the real reason is they were frustrated with life.”

The company said that as many as 2,000 workers were involved in the incident but that it was confined to an employee dormitory and “no production facilities or equipment have been affected.”

Nonetheless, the plant was closed, the company said.

Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan and employs more than 1.1 million workers in China, declined to say whether the Taiyuan plant made products for the Apple iPhone 5, which went on sale last week. A spokesman said the factory supplied goods to many consumer electronics brands. An employee at the Taiyuan plant said iPhone components were made there.

Supply-chain experts say most Apple-related production takes place in other parts of China, particularly in the provinces of Sichuan, Guangdong and Henan.

Apple referred questions to Foxconn.

Labor unrest in Taiyuan, in northern China’s Shanxi Province, comes as strikes and other worker protests appear to be increasing in frequency this year compared with last year, said Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit advocacy group in Hong Kong seeking collective bargaining and other protections for workers in mainland China.

Many of the protests this year appear to be related to the country’s economic slowdown, as employees demand the payment of overdue wages from financially struggling companies, or insist on compensation when money-losing factories in coastal provinces are closed and moved to lower-cost cities in the interior.

But the level of labor unrest in China this year has not yet matched 2010, when a surge in inflation sparked a wave of worker demands for higher pay, Mr. Crothall said.

The Taiyuan protest comes at a politically delicate time in China, with a Communist Party Congress expected in the coming weeks to anoint a new general secretary and a new slate of members for the country’s most powerful body, the Standing Committee of the Politburo.

The government has been tightening security ahead of the conclave through measures like restricting the issuance of visas and devoting considerable resources to watching and containing disturbances like the recent anti-Japanese demonstrations.

But the calendar may also be on Foxconn’s side. A weeklong public holiday starts this weekend to mark the country’s national day on Oct. 1. Factories across the country will close to allow workers to go home — and in the case of Foxconn’s Taiyuan factory, the dispersal of workers to hometowns could allow tempers to cool.

Mr. Crothall said that while the cause of the latest dispute in Taiyuan remained unclear, his group had found an online video of the police there using a megaphone to address “workers from Henan” — the adjacent province to the south of Shanxi. The police officer said that the workers’ concerns would be addressed.

Disputes involving large groups of migrant workers are common in China. In some cases, workers protest after believing that they have been promised a certain pay package and traveled a long distance to claim it, only to find on arrival that the details were different from what they expected. In other cases, workers from different provinces with different cultural traditions coming together in a single factory have clashed over social issues or perceived slights.

The disturbance is the latest problem to hit Foxconn.

Foxconn, which is part of Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, has been struggling to improve labor conditions at its China factories after reports about labor abuse and work safety violations.

Apple and Foxconn have worked together to improve conditions, raise pay and improve labor standards, particularly since March when the Fair Labor Association, a monitoring group invited by Apple to investigate conditions, found widespread problems.

Mr. Crothall said workers in China had become emboldened.

“They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice,” he said, adding that damage to factory buildings and equipment still appeared to be unusual, occurring in fewer than 1 in 20 protests.

The same Taiyuan factory was the site of a brief strike during a pay dispute last March, the Hong Kong news media reported then.

Social media postings suggested that some injuries might have occurred when people were trampled in crowds of protesters.

David Barboza reported from Shanghai, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.

Foxconn Plant in China Closed After Worker Riot

A spokesman said some people had been hurt and detained by the police after the disturbance escalated into a riot involving more than 1,000 workers late Sunday.

The company said the incident was confined to an employee dormitory and “no production facilities or equipment have been affected.” It said the cause of the disturbance was still under investigation.

One Foxconn employee reached by telephone Monday afternoon, however, said the incident began when workers started brawling with security guards.

Unconfirmed photographs and video circulated on social networking sites, purporting to be from the factory, showed smashed windows, riot police officers and large groups of workers milling around. The Foxconn plant, in the Chinese city of Taiyuan, employs about 79,000 workers.

The Chinese state-run news media said 5,000 police officers had been called in to quell the riot.

A Foxconn spokesman declined to specify whether the Taiyuan plant made products for the Apple iPhone 5, which went on sale last week, but he said it supplied goods to many consumer electronics brands.

An employee at the Taiyuan plant, however, said iPhone components were made there. Most Apple-related production, though, takes place in other parts of China, particularly in the provinces of Sichuan and Henan. Apple could not be reached for comment.

Foxconn said it employs about 1.1 million workers in China.

Labor unrest in Taiyuan, in northern China’s Shanxi province, comes as strikes and other worker protests appear to be increasing in frequency in China this year compared to last year, said Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit advocacy group in Hong Kong seeking collective bargaining and other protections for workers in mainland China.

Many of the protests this year appear to be related to the country’s economic slowdown, as employees demand the payment of overdue wages from financially struggling companies, or insist on compensation when money-losing factories in coastal provinces are closed and moved to lower-cost cities in the interior.   

But the level of labor unrest in China this year has not yet matched 2010, when a surge in inflation sparked a wave of worker demands for higher pay, Mr. Crothall said.   

Mr. Crothall said that while the cause of the latest dispute in Taiyuan remained unclear, his group had found an online video of police there using a megaphone to address “workers from Henan” – the adjacent province to the south of Shanxi. The police officer said that the workers’ concerns would be addressed.    

Disputes involving large groups of migrant workers are common in China. In some cases, workers protest after believing that they have been promised a certain pay package and traveled a long distance to claim it, only to find on arrival that the details are different from what they expected. In other cases, workers from different provinces with different cultural traditions coming together in a single factory have clashed over social issues or perceived slights.

The disturbance is the latest problem to hit Foxconn, which also is a key supplier to Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.

Foxconn, which is part of Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, has been struggling to improve labor conditions at its China factories after reports about labor abuse and work safety violations.

Apple and Foxconn have worked together in the last year to improve conditions, raise pay and improve labor standards.

Mr. Crothall said workers in China had become increasingly emboldened.

“They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice,” he said, adding that damage to factory buildings and equipment still appeared to be unusual, occurring in fewer than 1 in 20 protests.

The same Taiyuan factory was the site of a brief strike during a pay dispute last March, the Hong Kong news media reported then.

Social media postings suggested that some injuries might have occurred when people were trampled in crowds of protesters.

Fight Breaks Out at Foxconn Plant in China

The Taiyuan plant, which employs about 79,000 workers, makes parts for automotive electronics and assembles various electronic devices, according to Foxconn spokesman Louis Woo.

"The fight is over now ... we're still investigating the cause of the fight and the number of workers involved," said Woo, adding that "involving a couple thousand workers is possible".

Woo said the fight happened in the workers' dormitory facilities and said the company would issue a statement later on Monday.

China's Xinhuanet.com, operated by the Xinhua News Agency, said about 10 people were hurt in the fighting, citing police.

Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co and the world's largest contract maker of electronic goods, has seen a few violent disputes at its sprawling plants in China, where it employs a total of about 1 million workers.

By late morning, Hon Hai shares were down 1.14 percent, lagging the broader market's decline of 0.28 percent.

In June, about 100 workers went on a rampage at a Chengdu plant in southwestern China. The company has faced allegations of poor conditions and mistreatment of workers at its China operations, and has been spending heavily in recent months to improve the work environment and to raise wages.

A staff member at the Taiyuan plant said he was told the plant could be closed up to two to three days for police investigations.

"There are a lot of police at the site now," the staff member, who asked not to be named because he is not authorized to speak to media, told Reuters by telephone.

He said the plant also makes parts and assemble Apple's iPhone 5.

Calls to the Taiyuan police were not immediately answered, while an official at the plant declined to comment when reached by telephone.

(Additional reporting by Sally Huang in Beijing; Editing by Jonathan Standing and Ken Wills)

Foxconn Plant in China Closed After Worker Riot

A spokesman for the company said some people had been hurt and detained by the police after the disturbance escalated into a riot late Sunday. The company said the cause of the disturbance was still under investigation.

One Foxconn employee reached by telephone Monday afternoon, however, said the disturbance had begun when workers started brawling with security guards, and it eventually had led to a huge riot involving more than 1,000 workers. Foxconn said no property had been destroyed or damaged.

Unconfirmed photographs and video circulated on social networking sites, purporting to be from the factory, showed smashed windows, riot police officers and large groups of workers milling around. The Foxconn plant, in the central Chinese city of Taiyuan, employs about 79,000 workers.

The Chinese state-run news media said 5,000 police officers had been called in to quell the riot.

A Foxconn spokesman declined to specify whether the Taiyuan plant made products for the Apple iPhone 5, which went on sale last week, but he said it supplied goods to many consumer electronics brands.

An employee at the Taiyuan plant, however, said iPhone components were made there. Most Apple-related production, though, takes place in other parts of China, particularly in the provinces of Sichuan and Henan. Apple could not be reached for comment.

Foxconn said it employs about 1.1 million workers in China.

The disturbance is the latest problem to hit Foxconn, a key supplier of products to Apple and other global electronics companies, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.

Foxconn, which is part of Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, has been struggling to improve labor conditions at its China factories after reports about labor abuse and work safety violations.

Apple and Foxconn have worked together in the last year to improve conditions, raise pay and improve labor standards.

Disturbances at factories have become increasingly common in China, rights groups say, as laborers have begun to demand higher pay and better conditions.

Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit advocacy group in Hong Kong seeking collective bargaining and other protections for workers in mainland China, said workers in China had become increasingly emboldened.

“They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice,” he said, adding that damage to factory buildings and equipment still appeared to be unusual, occurring in fewer than 1 in 20 protests.

The same Taiyuan factory was the site of a brief strike during a pay dispute last March, the Hong Kong news media reported then.

Social media postings suggested that some injuries might have occurred when people were trampled in crowds of protesters.

Foxconn Factory in Taiyuan, China, Is Closed After Worker Riot

The company said several people were hospitalized and detained by the police after the disturbance, which occurred late Sunday, escalated into a riot.

Unconfirmed photographs and video that was circulated on social networking sites purporting to be from the factory showed smashed windows, riot police and large groups of workers milling about. The Foxconn plant, in the city of Taiyuan, in central China, employs about 79,000 workers.

A Foxconn spokesman declined to specify whether the Taiyuan facility made products for the Apple iPhone 5, which went on sale last week, but he said that it supplied goods to many consumer electronics brands. Foxconn said it employed about 1.1 million workers in China.

The disturbance is the latest to hit Foxconn, a key supplier of products to Apple and other global electronics companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Microsoft.

Foxconn, which is part of the Hon Hai Group of Taiwan, has been struggling to improve labor conditions at its China factories following reports about labor abuse and work safety violations.

Apple and Foxconn have worked together in the last year to improve conditions, raise pay and improve labor standards.

Disturbances at factories have become increasingly common in China, rights groups say, as laborers have begun to demand higher pay and better conditions.

Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit advocacy group in Hong Kong seeking collective bargaining and other protections for workers in mainland China, said workers in China had become increasingly emboldened.

“They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice,” he said.

The same Taiyuan factory was the site of a brief strike during a pay dispute last March, Hong Kong media reported then.

Social media postings suggested that some injuries might have occurred when people were trampled in crowds of protesters.

Foxconn Said to Use Forced Student Labor to Make iPhones

Foxconn has acknowledged using student “interns” on manufacturing lines, but says they are free to leave at any time. But two worker advocacy groups said Monday that they had spoken with students who said they had been forced by their teachers to assemble iPhones at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, in north-central China.

Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.

“They said they are forced to work by the teachers,” Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch, one of the advocacy organizations and a frequent critic of Foxconn’s labor policies, said in an interview on Monday. Mr. Li said his staff had spoken with multiple workers and students who, as recently as Sunday, said that 10 of 87 workers on an iPhone assembly line were students.

“They don’t want to work there — they want to learn,” said Mr. Li. “But if they don’t work, they are told they will not graduate, because it is a very busy time with the new iPhone coming, and Foxconn does not have enough workers without the students.”

Foxconn, in a statement, said that students made up just 2.7 percent of its 1.2 million-person work force in China — about 32,000 workers — and that schools “recruit the students under the supervision of the local government, and the schools also assign teachers to accompany and monitor the students throughout their internship.”

A spokesman for Apple declined to comment on the recent cases, but he said Apple’s code of conduct tells suppliers to follow local labor laws when dealing with interns and other workers.

Foxconn has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over working conditions inside factories that manufacture smartphones, tablet computers and other electronic devices for Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other technology giants. Investigations by newspapers, outside groups and companies like Apple itself have revealed illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers, improper disposal of hazardous waste and, in some cases, industrial accidents that have killed four people and injured more than 100 at Foxconn and other Chinese factories that supply Apple.

Earlier this year, following highly publicized reports of such problems, Apple asked an outside organization to audit working conditions inside the plants where the bulk of iPhones, iPads and other Apple products are built. In the wake of that audit, Foxconn announced it would significantly raise wages for many of its employees and reduce overtime hours to come into compliance with Chinese law.

In August, the Fair Labor Association — the group hired by Apple to audit Foxconn — said Foxconn had made progress at cutting employees’ hours and improving working conditions, but that those shifts would require Foxconn to recruit “tens of thousands of extra workers.” The group also said that Foxconn and Apple had adopted policies to make sure that student interns knew they could resign from Foxconn and still graduate, and to link the jobs they performed inside Foxconn with their studies.

“I am concerned about these recent reports, and we’re following up,” said Auret van Heerden, president and chief executive of the Fair Labor Association, in an interview. “If there have been any breakdowns in policies, we expect changes to be made.”

Worker advocates say Foxconn is under intense pressure at critical moments — like leading up to the release of a new product, like the iPhone 5 — to fill huge orders quickly.

Charles Duhigg reported from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 13, 2012

An article on Tuesday about new labor issues at Foxconn, a Chinese factory that makes Apple products, misstated the number of explosions that have occurred at the company’s plants. Only one explosion has occurred at a Foxconn plant, not “several.” (There have been several explosions at other companies that make Apple products in China.)

Foxconn Said to Use Forced Student Labor to Make iPhones

Foxconn has acknowledged using student “interns” on manufacturing lines, but says they are free to leave at any time. But two worker advocacy groups said Monday that they had spoken with students who said they had been forced by their teachers to assemble iPhones at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, in north-central China.

Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help ease worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.

“They said they are forced to work by the teachers,” Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch, one of the advocacy organizations and a frequent critic of Foxconn’s labor policies, said in an interview on Monday. Mr. Li said his staff had spoken with multiple workers and students who, as recently as Sunday, said that 10 of 87 workers on an iPhone assembly line were students.

“They don’t want to work there — they want to learn,” said Mr. Li. “But if they don’t work, they are told they will not graduate, because it is a very busy time with the new iPhone coming, and Foxconn does not have enough workers without the students.”

Foxconn, in a statement, said that students made up just 2.7 percent of its 1.2 million-person work force in China — about 32,000 workers — and that schools “recruit the students under the supervision of the local government, and the schools also assign teachers to accompany and monitor the students throughout their internship.”

A spokesman for Apple declined to comment on the recent cases, but he said Apple’s code of conduct tells suppliers to follow local labor laws when dealing with interns and other workers.

Foxconn has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over working conditions inside factories that manufacture smartphones, tablet computers and other electronic devices for Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other technology giants. Investigations by newspapers, outside groups and companies like Apple itself have revealed illegal amounts of overtime, crowded working conditions, under-age workers, improper disposal of hazardous waste and, in some cases, industrial accidents that have killed four people and injured more than 100 at Foxconn and other Chinese factories that supply Apple.

Earlier this year, following highly publicized reports of such problems, Apple asked an outside organization to audit working conditions inside the plants where the bulk of iPhones, iPads and other Apple products are built. In the wake of that audit, Foxconn announced it would significantly raise wages for many of its employees and reduce overtime hours to come into compliance with Chinese law.

In August, the Fair Labor Association — the group hired by Apple to audit Foxconn — said Foxconn had made progress at cutting employees’ hours and improving working conditions, but that those shifts would require Foxconn to recruit “tens of thousands of extra workers.” The group also said that Foxconn and Apple had adopted policies to make sure that student interns knew they could resign from Foxconn and still graduate, and to link the jobs they performed inside Foxconn with their studies.

“I am concerned about these recent reports, and we’re following up,” said Auret van Heerden, president and chief executive of the Fair Labor Association, in an interview. “If there have been any breakdowns in policies, we expect changes to be made.”

Worker advocates say Foxconn is under intense pressure at critical moments — like leading up to the release of a new product, like the iPhone 5 — to fill huge orders quickly.

Charles Duhigg reported from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 13, 2012

An article on Tuesday about new labor issues at Foxconn, a Chinese factory that makes Apple products, misstated the number of explosions that have occurred at the company’s plants. Only one explosion has occurred at a Foxconn plant, not “several.” (There have been several explosions at other companies that make Apple products in China.)