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Secret of China's low cost competitiveness in so called world's third largest economy.
5500 computer keyboards will move down the assembly line each day. Workers sit on hard wooden stools without backrests 12 hours a day racing to complete 500 keyboards an hour. Each worker will complete 35,750 operations a day.
High-tech misery in China:
Plastics & Electronics factory in Dongguan City, Guangdong, China
* Two thousand workers, mostly young women, produce computer equipment including keyboards and printer cases for well known global brand names.
* Management instructs the workers to “love the company like your home”, “continuously strive for perfection” and to spy on and “actively monitor each other”.
* Workers are prohibited from talking, listening to music, raising their heads, putting their hands in their pockets. Workers are fined for being one-minute late, for not trimming their fingernails and for stepping on the grass. Workers are searched on the way in and out of the factory. Workers who hand out flyers or discuss factory conditions with outsiders are fired.
* The young workers sit on hard wooden stools twelve hours a day, seven days a week as 500 computer keyboards an hour move down the assembly line, or one every 7.2 seconds. Workers are allowed just 1.1 seconds to snap each key into place, repeating the same operation 3250 times an hour, 35,750 times a day, 250,250 times a week and over one million times a month.
* The workers are paid 1/50th of a cent for each operation.
* The assembly line never stops, and workers needing to use the bathroom must learn to hold it until there is a break.
* All overtime is mandatory, with 12-hour shifts seven days a week and an average of two days off a month. A worker daring to take a Sunday off -- which is supposedly their weekly holiday -- will be docked 2.5 days’ wages. Including unpaid overtime, workers are at the factory up to 87 hours a week. On average, they are at the factory 81 hours a week, while toiling 74 hours, including 34 hours of overtime, which exceeds China’s legal limit by 318 per cent!
* The workers are paid a base wage of 64 cents an hour, which does not even come close to meeting subsistence level needs. After deductions for primitive room and board, the workers’ take-home wage drops to just 41 cents an hour. A worker toiling 75 hours a week will earn a take-home wage of $57.19, or 76 cents an hour including overtime and bonuses. The workers are routinely cheated of 14 to 19 per cent of the wages legally due them.
* Ten to twelve workers share each crowded dorm room, sleeping on narrow metal bunk beds that line the walls. They drape old sheets over their cubicle openings for privacy. In the winter, workers have to walk down several flights of stairs to fetch hot water in a small plastic bucket, which they carry back to their rooms to take a sponge bath. In the summer, dorm temperatures reach into the high 90s.
* Workers are locked in the factory compound four days a week and are prohibited from even taking a walk.
* To symbolise their “improving lives” the workers are served a special treat on Fridays -- a small chicken leg and foot. For breakfast, they are given watery rice gruel. The workers say the food has a bad taste and is “hard to swallow”.
* Illegally, workers are not inscribed in the mandatory work injury and health insurance and social security maternity leave program. In the molding department, due to the excessive heat, the workers suffer skin rashes on their faces and arms.
* One worker summed up the general feeling in the factory: “I feel like I am serving a prison sentence.”
I feel like I’m serving a prison sentence...”
“The factory is forever pressing down on our heads and will not tolerate even the tiniest mistake. When working, we work continuously. When we eat, we have to eat with lightning speed. When I need to go to the bathroom, I have to try my hardest to control myself, to hold it in and not go. The security guards are like policemen watching over prisoners. We’re really livestock and shouldn’t be called workers.
“Even when you get off your shift, there is no freedom. Even such simple pleasures as taking a walk or strolling down the street are closely managed by the factory.”
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