seen, the pay is between 900 and 1,200 RMB per month [about $130–$175 in late 2008]. In the villages the workers left, a farm family’s cash earnings might be a few thousand RMB per year. Pay is generally lowest, and discipline toughest, at factories owned and managed by Taiwanese or mainland Chinese companies. The gigantic Foxconn (run by its founder, Terry Gou of Taiwan) is known for a militaristic organization and approach. Jobs with Western firms are the cushiest but are also rare, since the big European and American companies buy mainly from local subcontractors. Casey says that monthly pay in some factories he owns is several hundred RMB more than the local average. His goal is to retain workers for longer than the standard few-year stint, allowing them to develop greater skills and a sense of company spirit.
A factory work shift is typically 12 hours, usually with two breaks for meals (subsidized or free), six or seven days per week. Whenever the action lets up—if the assembly line is down for some reason, if workers have spare time at a meal break—many people place their heads down on the table in front of them and appear to fall asleep instantly. Chinese law says that the standard workweek is 40 hours, so this means a lot of overtime, which is included in the pay rates above. Since their home villages may be several days’ travel by train and bus, workers from the hinterland usually go back only once a year. They all go at the same time—during the “Spring Festival,” or Chinese New Year, when ports and factories effectively close for a week or so and the nation’s transport system is choked. “The people here work hard,” an American manager in a U.S.-owned plant told me. “They’re young. They’re quick. There’s none of this ‘I have to go pick up the kids’ nonsense you get in the States.”
At every electronics factory I’ve seen, each person on an assembly line has a bunch of documents posted by her work-station: her photo, name, and employee number, often the instructions she is to follow in both English and Chinese. Often too there’s a visible sign of how well she’s doing. For the production line as a whole there are hourly totals of target and actual production, plus allowable and actual defect levels. At several Taiwanese-owned factories I’ve seen, the indicator of individual performance is a childish outline drawing of a tree with leaves. After each day’s shift, one of the tree’s leaves is filled in with a colored marker, either red or green. If the leaf is green, the worker has met her quota and caused no problems. If it’s red, a defect has been traced back to her workstation. One red leaf per month is within tolerance; two is a problem.
As in all previous great waves of industrialization, many people end up staying in town; that’s why Shenzhen has grown so large. But more often than was the case during
America’s or England’s booms in factory work, many rural people, especially the young women, work for two or three years and then go back to the country with their savings. In their village they open a shop, marry a local man and start a family, buy land, or use their earnings to help the relatives still at home.
Life in the factories is obviously hard, and in the heavy-industry works it is very dangerous. In the same week that 32 people were murdered at Virginia Tech, 32 Chinese workers at a steel plant in the north were scalded to death when a ladleful of molten steel was accidentally dumped on them. Even in Chinese papers, that story got less play than the U.S.shooting—and fatal coal-mine disasters are so common that they are reported as if they were traffic deaths. By comparison, the light industries that typify southern China are tedious but less overtly hazardous. As the foreman of a Taiwanese electronics factory put it to me when I asked him about rough working conditions, “Have you ever seen a Chinese farm?” An American industrial designer who works
A factory work shift is typically 12 hours, usually with two breaks for meals (subsidized or free), six or seven days per week. Whenever the action lets up—if the assembly line is down for some reason, if workers have spare time at a meal break—many people place their heads down on the table in front of them and appear to fall asleep instantly. Chinese law says that the standard workweek is 40 hours, so this means a lot of overtime, which is included in the pay rates above. Since their home villages may be several days’ travel by train and bus, workers from the hinterland usually go back only once a year. They all go at the same time—during the “Spring Festival,” or Chinese New Year, when ports and factories effectively close for a week or so and the nation’s transport system is choked. “The people here work hard,” an American manager in a U.S.-owned plant told me. “They’re young. They’re quick. There’s none of this ‘I have to go pick up the kids’ nonsense you get in the States.”
At every electronics factory I’ve seen, each person on an assembly line has a bunch of documents posted by her work-station: her photo, name, and employee number, often the instructions she is to follow in both English and Chinese. Often too there’s a visible sign of how well she’s doing. For the production line as a whole there are hourly totals of target and actual production, plus allowable and actual defect levels. At several Taiwanese-owned factories I’ve seen, the indicator of individual performance is a childish outline drawing of a tree with leaves. After each day’s shift, one of the tree’s leaves is filled in with a colored marker, either red or green. If the leaf is green, the worker has met her quota and caused no problems. If it’s red, a defect has been traced back to her workstation. One red leaf per month is within tolerance; two is a problem.
As in all previous great waves of industrialization, many people end up staying in town; that’s why Shenzhen has grown so large. But more often than was the case during
America’s or England’s booms in factory work, many rural people, especially the young women, work for two or three years and then go back to the country with their savings. In their village they open a shop, marry a local man and start a family, buy land, or use their earnings to help the relatives still at home.
Life in the factories is obviously hard, and in the heavy-industry works it is very dangerous. In the same week that 32 people were murdered at Virginia Tech, 32 Chinese workers at a steel plant in the north were scalded to death when a ladleful of molten steel was accidentally dumped on them. Even in Chinese papers, that story got less play than the U.S.shooting—and fatal coal-mine disasters are so common that they are reported as if they were traffic deaths. By comparison, the light industries that typify southern China are tedious but less overtly hazardous. As the foreman of a Taiwanese electronics factory put it to me when I asked him about rough working conditions, “Have you ever seen a Chinese farm?” An American industrial designer who works
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