Foxconn Admits Having Children Work All Night

Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn admitted on Friday that school interns had worked overtime and night shifts at a factory on the mainland, blaming "lax oversight" by local management.

The statement by Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics maker which assembles products for Apple and other international brands, came after a newspaper investigation found hundreds of children aged between 16 and 18 have been drafted in to make Amazon's Alexa devices.

Britain's The Guardian reported that teenagers from schools around the city of Hengyang were asked to work nights and overtime as "part of a controversial and often illegal attempt to meet production targets".

Foxconn said in a statement it has doubled the monitoring of its internship programme with its partner schools "to ensure that, under no circumstances, will interns (be) allowed to work overtime or nights."

Foxconn employs more than one million workers on the mainland and is the largest private employer in the country where cheap labour helped fuel the company's meteoric rise.

It came under the spotlight several years ago following allegations of employee suicides, labour unrest and the use of underage interns at its factories. (AFP)