Reuters, file

Zhang Tingzhen (center) is given a doll to play with by his mother Wei Xiuying while sitting beside his father Zhang Guangde at a Shenzhen hospital in southern China Sept. 26.

HONG KONG - Apple's largest contract manufacturer has been pushing for a Chinese worker left brain-damaged in a factory accident to be removed from hospital in a case that throws a harsh new spotlight on labor rights in China.

Zhang Tingzhen, 26, an employee of Taiwan firm Foxconn, had nearly half his brain surgically removed after surviving an electric shock at a plant in southern China a year ago. He remains in hospital under close observation by doctors, unable to speak or walk properly.

However, Foxconn, which is paying Zhang's hospital bills, has been sending telephone text messages to his family since July, demanding they remove him from hospital and threatening to cut off funding for his treatment -- a move the firm says would be justified under Chinese labor law.

Foxconn confirmed it had sent the messages, saying that under Chinese law the worker must submit himself to a disability assessment, a process that in Zhang's case would require him to be discharged from the Shenzhen hospital and travel the 43 miles to Huizhou, where he was first hired by Foxconn.

Risk of brain hemorrhage
The firm said in response to emailed questions that it would be prepared to return Zhang to the Shenzhen hospital after the assessment, though his father said Zhang was unfit to travel and that doctors felt he remained at risk of a brain hemorrhage.

The case has raised fresh questions over the labor record of Foxconn, one of the biggest and most high-profile private employers in China, after a series of well-publicized suicides among its army of around a million workers and recent outbursts of labor unrest.

Report: Riots break out at Foxconn factory in China

It has angered labor activists who say Zhang's plight also highlights China's patchy and sometimes precarious welfare system for workers seriously injured in industrial accidents and point out that there are many workers worse off than Zhang.

"They kept sending me SMSs every day to get my son out of hospital and to appear before an injury assessment body or they will stop paying all expenses, including his medical fees and our living expenses," Zhang's father, Zhang Guangde, said.

"You cannot imagine the suffering they put me through, how I had to fight every inch of the way just to get money so we can take care of our son," he added, speaking at his son's bedside at the Number 2 People's Hospital in Shenzhen.

Zhang was repairing a spotlight on an external wall at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, bordering Hong Kong, when he received an electric shock and fell 12 feet to the ground. He has since undergone five operations, has lost his memory, is incontinent and requires careful, regular monitoring.

Worker at Apple-supplier Foxconn in China: 'We're humans, we're not machines'

Workers who are disabled in workplace accidents and covered by insurance are eligible for compensation payouts, once their disability is assessed and graded by a panel of medical experts. The assessment is done after medical treatment is finished.

Foxconn sent the text messages -- and according to Zhang's father at one point briefly halted payments to the family -- despite a provincial law stipulating that injured workers can remain in treatment for up to two years before they must be assessed for disability compensation.

The company, however, denied that it delayed or stopped payments, saying it paid them on time.

Zhang, whose case was alerted to Reuters by labor activists, has been in hospital since October 2011.

'At the mercy' of system
Doctors at the Number 2 People's Hospital declined to comment for this article, but Zhang's father, 50, said they had not indicated that he could be discharged and had said they needed to keep his son under observation after implanting a tube in his body to drain fluid from his brain cavity to his bladder.

"The doctor told me they needed to monitor his condition and that for such serious injuries, a person was allowed to be treated in hospital for up to two years. After that, assessors can order treatment to be prolonged," the father said.

Labor activists in China say Zhang is just one of many thousands of Chinese workers who are left permanently disabled or chronically ill by workplace accidents, at the mercy of a system that often requires them and their families to fight degrading battles for treatment funding and compensation.

'This American Life' retracts damning report on Apple manufacturer Foxconn

"China now has laws specifying the types of compensation that are due to workers. But in many serious industrial accidents, companies still put workers or their families through a lot of suffering just to get what is due to them," said Choi Suet-wah of the Chinese Working Women Network in Hong Kong.

"They are robbed of their dignity," said Choi, who has extensive experience working with migrant workers in China.

Zhang is actually one of the lucky ones, social workers say, pointing out that Foxconn has at least been paying his hospital bills and the living expenses of his family, which has moved to Shenzhen from central China to be with him.

Worker suicide at Chinese plant of Apple supplier, Foxconn

They estimate that at least four out of 10 Chinese workers are not covered by any kind of insurance and are left to fend for themselves when seriously injured in the workplace -- despite laws requiring all employers to insure their workers.

"This is just one of many, many industrial accidents in China. And you almost certainly never get what you are entitled to, especially in serious cases," Choi said.

Dad: Son calls me 'mother'
Foxconn says it is insured against workplace accidents, which means its insurer would meet the cost of a compensation payment once Zhang's disability is finally assessed.

But compensation in China can vary depending on the city in which a worker's disability is assessed, and this, according to Zhang's family, is why Foxconn wants him to travel to Huizhou and refuses to have him assessed in Shenzhen.

Labor activists say wages and compensation levels are all substantially lower in Huizhou than in Shenzhen, one of the most expensive cities in China.

When asked why Zhang could not be assessed in Shenzhen, Foxconn said the law required him to go to Huizhou because he had signed his employment contract there. It added that it was prepared to send him back to the hospital in Shenzhen if the assessors determined that he required more medical attention.

In hospital, Zhang walks unsteadily, holding on to the bed frames of other patients in his shared room and, with a smile, sits down next to his father whose face tightens with emotion.

"He calls me 'mother' and calls my wife 'father.’ He can only mimic words you ask him to say, it is meaningless," the elder Zhang said later, holding a jar containing large fragments of his son's cranium. Doctors replaced a portion of Zhang's skull with synthetic bone.

He said that despite Foxconn's funding -- a monthly allowance of 11,000 yuan ($1,800) plus treatment costs -- the family had racked up 200,000 yuan ($31,800) in debt to pay for medicines not provided by the hospital and other expenses.

Back home in central Henan province, the family was building a house for Zhang to live in after his impending marriage when he was injured.

"We were building a three-story house," the elder Zhang said. "The project has since been abandoned and all the building materials we bought have been washed away by rain. But these workers still have to be paid. My whole life is over."

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TAIPEI - A young worker at a Chinese plant supplying tech giant Apple jumped from his apartment Wednesday, it was reported - the first suicide since the plant's owners agreed to improve work conditions. 

Foxconn Technology Group, the main supplier of Apple Inc, said on Thursday that the 23 year-old employee fell to his death from his apartment located outside the plant in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

The worker had joined the company last month and police were investigating the death. 

"Foxconn is sparing no efforts in cooperating with the police and helping with the investigations," the statement said, according to a report on the website of news channel Focus Taiwan.

Apple and Foxconn reached an agreement in March to improve conditions for the 1.2 million workers assembling iPhones and iPads, a landmark decision that could change the way Western companies do business in China. 

iPhone game to benefit Foxconn employee who attempted suicide

According to the agreement, Foxconn would hire tens of thousands of new workers to reduce overtime work, improve safety protocols and upgrade housing and other amenities. 

The move comes after Apple, criticized over working conditions at its sprawling chain of suppliers in China, agreed to an investigation by the independent Fair Labor Association earlier this year to stem criticism that its products were built in sweatshop-like conditions. 
A series of suicides among young workers were reported at Foxconn in 2010, and three workers died in an explosion at a Foxconn plant in Chengdu last June. 

A report in The New York Times also documented the cramped living conditions of Foxconn employees, as well as excessive hours on the job and seven-day workweeks in which employees stand for hours without break

'This American Life' retracts damning report on Apple manufacturer Foxconn

Foxconn also announced in mid-February it had raised wages for workers by 16 to 25 percent. 

Hon Hai Precision Industry, which makes iPhones and iPads for Apple, is the main listed unit of the Foxconn group, while Foxconn International manufactures handsets for clients such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

About 100 workers from Foxconn's Chengdu plant went on the rampage earlier this month after a dispute in a restaurant turned violent. 

Reuters contributed to this report.

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ZHENGZHOU, China -- In the eight years since Zhang Shuxiang first left her village in the poor interior of central China, she worked in 20 factories before coming to the assembly line of a Foxconn plant making products for tech firms including Apple. She wants it to be her last.

The 26-year-old has worked in factories making products as varied as coffee makers, jewelry and Apple's LED screens. Each time, she quit, blaming low wages and unreasonable supervisors, then joined another factory.

Reuters

In eight years, Zhang Shuxiang -- seen posing for a photograph at her home in Zhengzhou, China, on Wednesday -- has worked in 20 factories. She wants the Foxconn plant to be her last.

"Factory work is too tiring," she said when asked about life after Foxconn, which she plans to leave by June. "Since last year, I've kept on telling myself I would never want to enter a factory ever again, but I'm still doing it in spite of myself."

She embodies the shifting expectations and opportunities of tens of millions of young Chinese workers from the countryside who have turned their country into a workshop of the world.

Their changing attitudes pose a deep challenge for thousands of manufacturers, such as Foxconn and its big customer Apple, which have relied on what they once thought was a virtually endless stream of inexpensive, compliant workers.

Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou has pledged to keep on increasing worker salaries and cutting the hours of work, after it came under fire for poor working conditions for employees making Apple iPhones and iPads.

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Zhang now works on an assembly line for computer motherboards, in a factory inside a mammoth industrial complex on the outskirts of Zhengzhou, which Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook visited in late March during a trip to China.

Before finally deciding whether to quit, Zhang said she will wait to see what changes come from the agreement signed by Foxconn and Apple to improve working conditions.

Workers more aware of rights
Meeting the aspirations of Zhang and other migrant workers who power China's economy -- officially estimated at 159 million -- is crucial for the government. Younger, better educated and more tech-savvy, many migrant workers grew up as the sole children in their families and are less accepting than their parents were of tough working conditions.

They are also becoming more aware of their rights and of the widening growing range of available jobs, including services, that has come with rapid economic growth and which offer a way out of the relentless tedium of factory work.

"They are willing to take collective action, strikes, work stoppages, protests when they feel their rights have been violated or what they are owed has not been given to them," said Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for Hong Kong-based workers' rights group China Labor Bulletin.

"Workers know that if they stand their ground and ask for better pay and conditions, employers ... have to agree to some of their demands," he added.

Apple, supplier pledge to improve conditions

Duncan Innes-Ker, senior China analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, said there is a "perfect storm of factors" coming together to support workers as they push for higher wages: sustained economic growth, government policy support for a higher minimum wage and demographics.

Joe Tan / Reuters, file

Employees eat their meal on a guardrail of a bridge near the Foxconn recruitment center in Shenzhen, Guangdong province in this Feb. 22 file photo.

The number of young Chinese workers aged 15-24 years of age will likely fall by a third in the next 12 years, giving more bargaining power to this younger blue-collar generation, Beijing-based consultancy Dragonomics has projected.

Advocates decry Foxconn treatment of student interns

The average monthly wage of China's migrant workers in 2011 rose 21.2 percent from 2010 to 2,049 yuan ($320), with wages higher in the more developed coastal areas like Guangdong. Even so, despite the recent increases, such wages are still many times lower than in Western developed economies.

On a recent afternoon outside a labor market in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan, a scattering of people were scrutinizing recruitment placards on a fence. Companies were looking for store managers, retail assistants and accountants. Some were offering salaries that range from 1,200 to 6,000 yuan.

'All menial work'
Xie Wen, 22, an unemployed former nurse, looked horrified when asked whether she was considering a job at a factory.

"It sounds good, but it's all menial work. If you want to earn a lot, you have to work a lot of overtime," she said, adding that she does not want her next job "to be too tough. I don't want any night shifts and I don't do overtime."

Her friend, Jin Jin, 27, who has been looking for work since she quit her job at a pharmacy a month ago, said she resigned because it was "meaningless" work. Since 2004, she has held four to five jobs and is now seeking one in sales that pays about 2,000 yuan, with about 4-6 days off a month, subsidized meals and overtime fees.

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Clad in a black blazer, jeans and pink sequined shoes, Dou Jing, 20, said she worked in the quality control department in an electronics factory for a year after high school.

"It was very tiring. I had to work night shifts that lasted 12 hours," Dou said. She later found a job as a receptionist for a small company, greeting guests and pouring tea for them.

"I didn't feel I could learn anything," she said, adding she wanted to learn some skills in her next job and open a shop.

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Walking through the crowd, a man surnamed Yang was trying to recruit telemarketers. He was distributing flyers that offered wages of 3,000 to 5,000 yuan a month, but not many people expressed interest.

"Workers are more choosy, they want a high salary, a job that's close to home and work that has very little responsibility," he said. "I think that's unrealistic."

Although the younger, more finicky cohort of migrant workers could pose a challenge for China's exporters, Innes-Ker said "we're still a long way away from the idea that foreign companies are moving out of China because it's too expensive."

"It's very difficult to find somewhere with the similar strengths of China," he said. "When it comes down to it, China has massive clusters that allow a very high degree of specialization to occur, and that helps to push down costs quite dramatically."

'Eat bitterness'
Zhang's elder brother, Zhang Junfeng, 30, who also works at Foxconn, said turnover is particularly rampant among younger factory workers, particularly those born in the 1990s.

"They'll resign the minute they get angry," Junfeng said. "Very few of them can eat bitterness."

Reuters

Zhang Junfeng (left), picks vegetables with his relatives at their home in Zhengzhou, Henan province Wednesday.

Eating bitterness is an expression used by Chinese who have endured decades of natural and man-made hardships throughout China's tumultuous history -- a term that also applies to Zhang's parents, who are both 61 and were farmers their whole lives.

On a recent afternoon, the pair sat in the courtyard of their home in Yezhang village, an hour's drive from Zhengzhou along several unpaved roads that cut through fields of wheat. They were picking through freshly harvested spinach from their fields to sell in Zhengzhou.

Zhang laughed when asked how her life is different from her parents, whose faces are brown and wrinkled from the sun. "At that time how can there be factories? That time, there were communes," she said.

China tells activist Ai Weiwei to turn off webcams

The round-faced Zhang, clad in a red tunic and black sweatpants, knows a thing or two about eating bitterness.

She was 18 when her mother paid a middleman 600 yuan to find her a factory job in Dongguan, a gritty city in Guangdong. When she arrived after a two-day rickety bus ride in 2004, she called home and cried to her mother after only a few days.

Unreasonable quotas?
In a Foxconn factory in Longhua in a suburb of Shenzhen, Zhang said she was hospitalized for two weeks in late 2011, blaming her supervisor for setting unreasonable quotas. She finally protested with her feet, quitting after about three months.

In one day, Zhang is required to paste 5,000 round dots by hand on a component for motherboards.

Yet even with the tedious work, Zhang says conditions at the Zhengzhou factory are better than at the previous Foxconn factories where she's worked. Her workday is about eight hours and she is given eight days off a month.

Foxconn pays her a base salary of 1,550 yuan a month, an increase from 1,320 yuan the year before, and extra for overtime duty. She lives four to a room in her dormitory, which she pays 150 yuan a month to rent and is Spartan with just two metal bunk beds and a desk.

Back at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen where Zhang worked in 2010, workers on the assembly line were banned from talking to one another and taking toilet breaks that exceed 10 minutes, according to Zhang.

"At that time, that made me think of the phrase: 'We're humans, we're not machines'," she said.

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An episode of the popular weekly radio program "This American Life" that painted a damaging picture of life for employees at factories that make Apple products in China contained "significant fabrications," the show said Friday.

"We're horrified to have let something like this onto public radio," Ira Glass, the public radio show's executive producer and host, said in a blog post. "Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards."

The program retracted the Jan. 6 piece that is believed to have started the recent spate of articles examining Apple manufacturer Foxconn.

The 39-minute piece received 888,000 downloads and became its most popular podcast, according to the show. The story detailed what it said were extremely poor working conditions of Chinese workers making products such as iPhones and iPads at factories owned by a company called Foxconn, which also manufactures products for other electronics giants.

Apple protesters hit stores, hack Foxconn

The piece vaulted Mike Daisey into the role of Apple's chief critic, the post on NPR.org said, and also inspired a Change.org petition that collected more than 250,000 signatures demanding that Apple better the working conditions at the factories. According to the statement, the program did not commission the piece, but grabbed it from Daisey's one-man performance, "The Agony and The Ecstasy of Steve Jobs."

In a press release, the show said it first learned Daisey had fabricated parts of his story when the public radio program "Marketplace" tracked down Daisey's interpreter, who disputed parts of Daisey's monologue.

"Daisey lied to me and to 'This American Life' producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast," Glass said. "That doesn't excuse the fact that we never should've put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake." 'This American Life' will devote its entire program this weekend to detailing the errors in the story," the press release said.

During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey's story, staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter's contact information. According to the press release, Daisey told them her cell phone didn't work and provided an incorrect name. He said he had no way to reach her.

"At that point, we should've killed the story," Glass said. "But other things Daisey told us about Apple's operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn't think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake."

The New York Times also documented the cramped living conditions of Foxconn employees, as well as excessive hours on the job and seven-day workweeks in which employees stand for hours without break. The article included reports of underage employees and workers exposed to deadly chemicals used to build and clean Apple products, documented deadly accidents at the plant and included damning quotes about Apple's ambivalence about working conditions. Other published accounts reported worker suicides at the plant, as well as the very low pay -- $1.78 an hour, according to another report by Business Insider.

According to the press release, Daisey's interpreter,  Li Guifen (who goes by the name Cathy Lee professionally when working with westerners) disputed two of the most dramatic moments in Daisey's story: his meeting with underage workers at Foxconn and his reporting on a man with a mangled hand that he allegedly injured at Foxconn making iPads.

In the show airing this weekend, Daisey apologizes for the misrepresentations, according to the press release.

"It was completely wrong for me to have it on your show," he is quoted as telling Glass, "and that's something I deeply regret." He also expressed his regret to "the people who are listening, the audience of 'This American Life,' who know that it is a journalism enterprise, if they feel betrayed."

This article includes reporting by msnbc.com's Becky Bratu.

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Bobby Yip / Reuters file

Workers are seen inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in the southern Guangdong province, in 2010.

BEIJING—Last week, the New York Times published a report about working conditions at factories producing Apple products in China.  Under the spotlight was Foxconn Technology, a key manufacturer for Apple and “China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers,” responsible for churning out tens of millions of iPhones and iPads sold around the world.

The article focused specifically on Foxconn’s Chengdu factory, where employees have complained about nonstop shifts, arduous overtime, crowded dormitories, mental health (nearly twenty workers at Foxconn have committed suicide over two years), and a hazardous working environment that's led to at least one explosion, in May 2011.

The New York Times report was also published in Chinese in the well-respected business and economic news weekly Caixin, where Chinese readers could post comments in response to the story. 

Since it was released over the Lunar New Year festival, a week-long holiday which brings the country to a rare standstill, reaction seemed relatively muted.  As we write this, there were 650 comments on Caixin’s Weibo page (a Twitter-like Chinese microblog)--compared to the 1,770 comments on the Times’ website. 

A cynical reaction in China
On Caixin’s Weibo site, some of the comments condemned Apple’s corporate practices, but many also criticized the Chinese government for failing to protect its own citizens.

“Labor protection and social security is not only the responsibility of corporations.  If the government had regulations and supervised the corporations, then they cannot be that irresponsible,” wrote one person. 

A significant number also captured a sentiment that was cynical but perhaps very pragmatic of many Chinese: 

“If they don’t work for Apple, those workers don’t have anywhere to shed their sweat and blood.”

“Why not kick Apple out?  Tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs.“

“They are criticizing Apple only, because Apple is a huge target.  The migrant workers hired by state-owned enterprises here can hardly be as good as Apple’s.  Take care of your own workers before you pay attention to other people’s suppliers.”

All of which was bolstered by something this week that explains--in part--why the response in China might not be as outraged as those in the West might expect.

Workers want those jobs
On Monday, tens of thousands of people lined up outside a job agency to apply for an estimated 100,000 new jobs Foxconn is seeking to fill at its factory in Zhengzhou, the capital of central Henan province. 

Foxconn wants to double its current workforce of 130,000 at the Zhengzhou plant, which it opened last year.  The facility already churns out 200,000 iPhones a day and is part of Foxconn’s grand plan to make Zhengzhou the world’s largest smartphone manufacturing base.

The basic starting salary advertised--according to a report posted on M.I.C. Gadget, a blogsite about tech and other related matters in China—is 1,650 yuan a month ($261), which includes dorm housing and food.

The pay is lower than comparable salaries Foxconn pays workers at its Shenzhen factory in southern China.  But that may be a sacrifice Henan workers are willing to make initially. 

With a population in excess of 100 million, Henan is China’s most populous province.  A fifth of them are migrant workers who travel widely to find jobs in the country’s more prosperous regions like the south or coast.

With additional reporting from Bo Gu.