Students duped into ‘summer jobs’

Tricked by employment agencies, some 300 hundred university students from Henan Province traveled to Foxconn's factory in Langfang, Hebei Province for work this month, but when they arrived on July 11, they were not allowed past the gates and their agents could not be reached.

After calling police for help, the students found a place to stay the night with help from the officers before returning home the next day, when the group eventually agreed to settle the case with the involved agencies for a compensation of 150 yuan ($25) each - despite having already paid the agents 200 yuan for travel fees. The agencies said only that there was an error in the hiring information they had obtained.

One of the students who went to Hebei, a sophomore surnamed Cheng at Henan Institute of Engineering, said that an agent, also a fellow student, who was acting as an intermediary between the employment agency and students at the school led her and her peers to believe that they would have summer jobs at Foxconn.

"We were guaranteed a monthly salary of 2,800 yuan to 3,500 yuan," she told the Global Times. "But when we got to the factory, we couldn't get in and none of the agents would answer or return our calls."

Having previously secured summer work through the same agent, Cheng did not expect there to be a problem this year and said she would think twice about going through such agents in the future.

Rotten deals

The case is just one of many that have made headlines in recent weeks as scheming agents, a large number of them also students, take advantage of naive students on summer vacation who are desperate enough to travel vast distances for temporary employment without securing legal contracts.

Most of the time, students pay a fee to the agents who are supposed to arrange jobs for them, many of which are often far from their hometowns.

But recently, more students are arriving only to run into problems: either the job is not available, or the pay is substantially lower than agreed upon.

In addition, the students are left stranded in a new place unknown to them and with no one to turn to for help.

Xiong Bingqi, an education expert and deputy director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, said that the increasing ease at which university students are repeatedly duped by such agents is particularly concerning as it reveals their lack of awareness in the real world.

"A lot of the time, students don't pay enough attention and they get trapped by acquaintances," Xiong said. "Students need to be more alert; they should know how important it is to review a company's license and sign a contract before agreeing to work.

Lack of regulation

Xiong said that the lack of regulation on the conduct of such agents makes students more vulnerable to being cheated, adding that schools should do more to prepare students in this regard.

But a majority of career centers at Chinese universities focus on helping graduates seek employment, not on guiding students to find summer jobs.

"But at the same time, we always remind students not to trust fishy recruitment schemes like those that are often advertised on flyers," a career center employee at Beijing Normal University, who preferred not to be identified, told the Global Times.

A salaried stepping stone

Yet for students like Cheng, working a factory job away from home for the summer is a way to earn better money.

"Most of my previous summer jobs were at factories," she said. "These jobs pay tend to pay more than others."

But while some say that career-driven students shouldn't waste their time by getting factory jobs that have nothing to do with their studies, Xiong said that students can round themselves out and learn important life skills to comprehensively improve their overall development by working on production lines.

"Besides, not all students can expect to find a job related to their studies if schools don't help them find temporary placements," he said.