Don’t work at Foxconn. If you happen to be out of a job and happen to be in China, find the nearest McDonald’s and beg to flip burgers. Venture out into the farmlands and do everything you can to find someone who will pay you to dig ditches. Head to the coast, find a fishing boat, start baiting hooks. Whatever you do, just don’t take a job building iPhones if you can possibly help it. It’s just not worth it.Unfortunately, not all Chinese youth have the luxury to say no to the Taiwanese manufacturing company. Zhang Tingzhen is one of them. The 26-year-old took a job working on the factory floor in Huizhou like a lot of his peers. One day he was outside fixing a spotlight, when something went wrong, and he took an electric shock that threw him 12-feet down onto the ground. He survived — sort of. Doctors href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/10/us-china-foxconn-worker-idUSBRE8991M620121010">ended up removing nearly half of his brain, and Zhang has been lying in a hospital bed ever since, incontinent, unable to speak or walk.As if Zhang’s accident itself weren’t horrible enough, Foxconn has been characteristically horrible since then. While the company fulfilled its obligation to pay Zhang’s medical bills at first, it quickly tired of the expense and started sending threatening text messages to Zhang’s family. The company demanded that his family take Zhang out of the hospital — he’s in no condition to leave — and said that it would cut off funding for his treatment. “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,” said Zhang’s father, Zhang Guangde. “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.”Foxconn has admitted to sending the messages and says that it needs Zhang to undergo the injury assessment in Huizhou because that’s where he signed his employment contract. Zhang is in the hospital in Shenzen, an hour and a half away. Again, Zhang is in no condition to travel. “He calls me ‘mother’ and calls my wife ‘father’. He can only mimic words you ask him to say, it is meaningless,” his father told Reuters while holding a jar full of the removed parts of his son’s cranium. Meanwhile, the family is already tens of thousands of dollars in debt, despite the help that Foxconn has offered.If you’ve been keeping up with the Foxconn saga, you might not find any of this very surprising. This is the same company that href="http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/12/chinese-students-say-they-are-being-forced-to-build-your-next-iphone">forces student interns to work on the production line and drove its workers href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2012/01/foxconn-still-hard-place-work/47193/">to form a suicide pact in an attempt to get better working conditions. Most recently, as many as 2,000 Foxconn workers href="http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/9/24/the-foxconn-iphone-riot-was-just-one-of-hundreds-in-china-today">were rioting in the dormitories of the company’s Taiyuan factory. This is clearly not a fun place to work.So if you can help it, avoid Foxconn. With the latest case of the lobotomized, it’s starting to look less like The Jungle and more like Saw class="caps">III. That’s not a good look.
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