After being labeled a "sweatshop" for churning out goods for household names such as Hewlett Packard, Apple and Dell over the past decade, Taiwan's most famous company, Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., better known by its trade name Foxconn, has recently made headlines again.

In early October, 4,000 workers reportedly participated in a strike at the company's facility in Zhengzhou, capital city of Henan Province, resulting in the suspension of production for one day.

Insiders say the action was largely caused by the higher management's ignorance of the incredible pressure that workers came under in trying to detect defects in the iPhone 5 that were no more than two-hundredths of a millimeter in size, while reaching stipulated production quotas.

In another case, a large-scale clash between thousands of Foxconn workers and security guards at the factory campus in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, on September 23 left 40 men injured. The unrest only ended when thousands of police were called in.

All of these recent incidents have once again reflected the escalating tensions between the company and the growing demands for changes in the management style by the more than one million employees that prop up the booming empire.

Man versus machine

The problem first came to the public's attention over two years ago, when a series of incidents related to worker unrest put the spotlight on Foxconn's walled facilities.

The most sensational was a series of suicides at the Shenzhen facility, called Longhua Science & Technology Park, in which 11 workers jumped to their deaths within five months of each other in early 2010. The cases dominated media outlets and the Internet, and immediately put Foxconn's secretive world under the spotlight.

In response to the public's severe criticism of the management at Foxconn, notorious for its tough working environment and high pressure put on every individual worker, a series of measures was then taken by the management in the hope of giving the company a more humane face.

Since 2010, Foxconn has raised frontline workers' basic salaries on three occasions, from the 900 yuan ($144) before the spate of suicides to the current 2,200 yuan.

Early this year, Foxconn worked with Apple to conduct an independent review of workers' conditions through a "special but voluntary audit" by the Fair Labor Association on its factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu.

Based on the results of the March audit, Foxconn promised to respond to the violations of Apple's Supplier Code of Conduct found in the audit, such as making employees work more than 60 hours a week and hiring laborers below the age of 16.

However, in the experts' view, all of these changes were mostly a response to scrutiny from society and major customers such as Apple and Dell.

"Basically, the Foxconn management never tried to deal with the issue at its root by responding to workers' needs," said Liu Kaiming, executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation.

"As a typical Taiwanese company, Foxconn is good at calculating time on its assembly lines to the minute so as to ensure maximum efficiency and profit.  Workers at the non-stop assembly line are more like machines than human beings," Liu added, a view that has been echoed by several Foxconn workers reached by the Global Times.

"Rather than being regarded as a member of the company, we are simply 'machines' that the company bought to keep the assembly line running," reads one Weibo entry by a Foxconn worker in Shenzhen.

In addition to the monotonous nature of the work and the intense pressure of meeting the high quota for approved products, the quasi-military management style at Foxconn is almost universally despised by its workers, who feel they have been deprived of all freedom in their lives.

"Almost none of the Foxconn workers take pride in producing these so-called 'great' iPhones in our hands. What we feel is purely a buy-and-sell relationship. No one would regard our dormitory as a 'cozy home' when the security guards can push open the doors at any time for a security check," said one worker surnamed Huang on his microblog, which many of his colleagues follow.

They directly call the factory campus a "prison," where order is kept by hundreds of security guards notorious for the way they bully workers.

With only a middle school diploma, 25-year-old Huang began work at Foxconn's facility in Zhengzhou in February last year, largely drawn by the higher-than-average salary. Huang's job is to package the finished iPhone5 product on the assembly line, and he normally works more than 10 hours every day.

Soon, however, the young man found life at the assembly line tougher than he had ever imagined.

"Without putting yourself there, you can never know that kind of feeling. It's basically a mixture of desperation and loss," said Huang helplessly in an online chat with the Global Times after his shift.

Online support

However, sweeping technological and demographic changes have put some of the pressure back on Foxconn.

For the first generation of migrant workers in China in the early 1980s and 1990s, the aim was merely to make money and send it back to their homes in the countryside. Today, however, more and more workers are turning to the Internet to give vent to their complaints in the hope of getting help from society to change their situation by documenting their lives on the factory floor.

Through workers' diary-like postings on microblogs, all the small details of their daily lives put together a comprehensive picture of Foxconn's working situations at their facilities across China.

Some post their salary slips of more than 4,000 yuan on the Internet, only to add that the factory still forces employees to work for more than a hundred hours each week.

Others try to use the online platform to garner support from society or for individual workers seeking more compensation from the company for their workplace injuries.

And of course, there is also real-time coverage of any "big news" in what one foreign media outlet called Foxconn's "Forbidden Cities," whether it's workers' strikes, a factory riot or another tragic suicide.

"Many feel our generation lacks the spirit of hard work. Actually, that's not true. What we care about most is fair opportunity for development, and freedom and dignity in our work," said Huang.

While Foxconn, due to its high profile in global manufacturing, inevitably ends up as the target of people's attention, many argue that the company, and the management model it represents, is the embodiment of thousands of manufacturing plants across China, where strikes and factory unrest are a common occurrence.

Experts say that in the face of the changing labor force of today's China, where 60-70 percent of migrant workers were born after the 1980s and 1990s, real change needs to be made immediately so as to prevent a repeat of these frequent incidents and riots.

"We can no longer regard them as people who will continue to work on the assembly line without thinking, but instead, as an innovative group," said Sun Haifa, a professor at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.

"Foxconn, as well as many other Chinese companies, need to hear more from their employees about their needs, and to really incorporate the employees' desire for development into the management, and to bring their welfare and demands for education and leisure into consideration," Sun suggested.

Scarcity of workers

In mid-October, Hon Hai acknowledged that it had hired underage interns at its Yantai facility in Shandong Province, and vowed to take "full responsibility" for the violations.

But the scandal itself showed the difficulties the company has experienced in hiring workers, despite a series of strategies it has taken to meet its huge appetite for laborers as it seeks to take advantage of the cheap labor in inland China.

The qualifications required to become a Foxconn worker are very simple - employees must not have tattoos or scars on the body, and must be aged 18 or above.

However, compared to its peak period, when Foxconn was hiring 3,000 new workers a day, the company is finding it increasingly hard to find people who have the desire to work in difficult manufacturing jobs.

In Henan, the provincial government put in place a specific quota to help Foxconn, the biggest contributor to the local GDP, to hire workers.

"Normally, for every newcomer, there is a subsidy of 500 yuan from the company, of which 400 is given to the newcomers as a starting bonus, while the remaining 100 yuan goes to the person who hired him," said Zhang Minqiang, a mid-level leader at Foxconn's Taiyuan Plant, who encourages everyone under his department to help find new workers.

At the end of July, Foxconn announced that it would bring in a total of 1 million robots to its assembly line in three years.

"We cannot claim that manufacturing jobs are exciting for workers. It's kind of boring and requires a lot of hard work, so we have to change that, rather than hope the workers will change," Hon Hai spokesperson Louis Woo once told the Wall Street Journal after the Taiyuan factory unrest.

Requests by the Global Times to Foxconn for an interview went unanswered.

At Zhang's workshop, which is dedicated to producing a metal circle for the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, there are between 30 and 40 robots on every assembly line. But for Zhang, there are some parts of the work that cannot be done by robots.

"The robots are mainly used to punch holes, such as the holes for headphones and USB interfaces. However, inside the holes, there might be some barbed filaments that need to be finely polished, and this can only be done by humans," said Zhang.

Believing that life is not only about work, Huang from Zhengzhou said he is thinking about leaving. "I don't want to while away the last of my youth here," Huang said.

When asked what he wants to do next, his answer is simple but to the point. "Anything is fine, as long as it won't make me feel like I am living only for Apple phones," said Huang.

Zhang Yan contributed to this story