Internships, especially unpaid ones, have often been compared to slave labor. This time, however, the comparison might be a bit more accurate. Chinese media have reported that over a thousand Chinese college students were forced to work long hours in order to produce Sony's highly anticipated PlayStation 4 game console ahead of its Nov. 15 release date.

More than a thousand students from Xi'an's Technological University North Institute of Information Engineering (XIT) were required to do an internship that placed them on a PS4 assembly line run by Taiwanese company Foxconn's Yantai vocational campus in the Shangdong Province. If the students did not participate, they would not receive six credits needed to graduate, China Daily, a Chinese State newspaper, and Oriental Daily, a Hong Kong newspaper, reported.

After an internal investigation, Foxconn discovered that XIT students were working overnight and overtime shifts, which is against company policy. According to a statement released to Aljazeera America, Foxconn "determined that there have been a few instances where our policies pertaining to overtime and night shift work were not enforced."

"Immediate actions have been taken to bring that campus into full compliance with our code and policies," the company said in a statement to Quartz. "[Foxconn is] reinforcing the policies of no overtime and no night shifts for student interns, even though such work is voluntary, and reminding all interns of their rights to terminate their participation in the program at any time."

Despite the mistreatment of their interns, Foxconn is placing the blame on the schools.

"While we provide vocational schools with our qualification requirements and each of our campuses works directly with the schools in their province to carry out the program, it is the schools that recruit the students under the supervision of the relevant local government, and the schools also assign teachers to accompany and monitor the students throughout their internship program," Foxconn told Aljazeera.

Foxconn said that interns make the same amount of money as entry-level employees. Their internship program also has "assurances that participation is voluntary, interns are free to terminate their internship at any time they choose and interns are not allowed to take part in overtime work or work night shifts," Aljazeera reports.

According to Quartz, the interns' work consists of putting cords in boxes, gluing parts together and applying stickers.

Neither Sony nor XIT has commented on the situation.

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