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The Making of a Motherboard at ECS
sheiky writes "Hardcoreware.net has posted a look at the manufacturing process of a motherboard at a new ECS factory in Shen Zhen. Unlike most factories, they build boards from the ground up at one location, starting with the PCB all the way to a finished product. They also talk a little bit about the working conditions they witnessed in China."
http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/06/16/ecs_shen_z hen_factory_tours/1.html
"Oh boy"
even though they are getting paid very little in comparison to bloated unionized factories in North America.
Not to get on too much of a rant... but we can thank unions for a lot of things... like weekends off and decent salaries. Without unions, we'd still be working seven days a week in sweatshops.
Sadly, China has no unions, so they do have sweatshops and low wages. I'd argue that China's workers would be better off if they did form unions.
(and... before everyone here starts moaning about their employers, yes, I know many of you do work very long work weeks in the tech business. I've worked for several startups myself)
All of these motherboard factory tours (there have been a few) are pretty scary. We see the really cool equipment, and get to hear the tests each piece of hardware goes through, and then we hear about how their employees do really repetitive tasks, for low wages, with tough ("military-style"), if not abusive, bosses, in an insulting environment (the "grape system"?! What are they, kindergarteners?!?!). Sure, they're efficient, and the product is relatively cheap, but do we want to support the ways these companies treat their workers, even if it's "okay" with the workers?
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
I work a Fry's Electronics. The rurmor at my store is is that ECS is owned by Fry's. I have never seen or heard anything to validate or disprove that, so take it with a grain of salt.
Anywho, regardless of ownership, ECS products are the favorite things to sell at Fry's. From the ECS motherboards to their Great Quality branded computers and notebooks.
As an employee in the service department (and thus, responisble for repairing computers when they fail) I can tell you the anything made by ECS is complete dirt. The GQ computers are not too bad, but I have never seen so many DOA motherboards in my life. We had a customer buy a mobo/cpu combo last week and his board was DOA. We ended up going though SIX (yes "6") more boards before we found one that would actually work.
DO NOT BUY ECS PRODUCTS.
Here's are pictures from a US manufacturer of PC boards. Notice how it's done. No long row of women putting in components; it's one guy standing around watching the machines do the work. Automated insertion machines put in the components, and transfer conveyors connect the machines. That's the way it should be.
Only the really low wages of China make labor-intensive manual assembly feasible. Even in Mexico, you'd use automated assembly. Assembly in Japan has been automated for decades. If the US imposed import duties on very-low-wage countries that equalized wage costs to even $1/hour, this excessive "offshoring" would stop.
The last page has the completely naive part about working conditions. The reviewer, Carl Nelson, has no way to know whether the redfaced employee was just embarassed at their bad day report being photographed, or whether there are severe punishments. China's mafia government executes people for software/content piracy, among other fascist means of keeping people in line with their "discipline". They routinely torture people for interfering with official government policy.
(FWIW, I'm not comparing China to the US or elsewhere, where there is also too much torture and executions, for whatever reason. There is no relativism that justifies torturing people, certainly not over economics.)
The first page has the claim that "Pretty soon every computer you buy is going to have an ECS motherboard in it!" Although that's probably just wrong, it shows how naive is the reviewer about the real world outside motherboard specs. If it were true, I'd be worried about a single company, a single factory (which can halt or be destroyed) representing a single point of failure for every computer in the world, or even (especially) in the US.
That article is about as analytical as a videogame review. That is, not at all, after being bought off by a free trip to the factory where their toys get made.
--
make install -not war
You have to see it from the other side too. At United Parcel Service I saw firsthand how evil both sides are. I remember managers telling supervisors to do things that were just plain wrong. For example, packages would move down a conveyor belt at a particular speed. The guys at the end of the belt would need to wait an extra 3-5 minutes before packages started arriving to be loaded. For this reason, supervisors were told to stagger the start times of the back employees 5-10 minutes later to save a few dollars each day. This was so patently ridiculous but it was policy. Policy that was not always told to the employees. The reasoning was that they needed to be in their work area before start time and be prepared to load when packages arrived. In other words, work for free setting up for the first ten minutes because that's our policy.
How about the union (Teamsters)? I visited a facility once dressed in a suit and tie (I was in IT). My job was to show employees how to work a bar code scanner for a new tracking system. As I was talking to the employee two large guys (also in suits) arrived and stood on either side of me. I picked up a Next Day Air letter to show how to scan (I thought they were managers checking my training procedure). Nope, soon as I touched the letter one guy shouts out, "What the fuck you doing? You're not supposed to touch packages." He tells me that he can shut down the entire facility in a second and that I shouldn't be touching packages. He's shouting two inches from my face. At this point the facility manager comes by and starts talking with the union guys to smooth things over.
Management and unions (at least the ones at UPS) are just a bunch of pricks looking for money. They're both evil. The problem is that you let one group get the upper hand and it may be even worse (look at the current political parties in the US for a similar thing).
I've been to some of those factories in Shenzhen, been down around the manufacturing lines too. So here's a few general observations based on my own experiences - First thing that struck me is that this guy managed to get photos! The places I visited even our mobile phones were taken from us before we entered the manufacturing area, we'd be in deep shit with security if we pulled out a camera to take pictures. You'll also notice pictures of products there ... majour security breech in my opinion!
- Secondly look what they're making, look at the cleanliness of the place. It's the reason many western countries are in trouble ... because in China they have the skills to make high-end products and they can do it cheaper and faster than the rest of us. Plus they are very highly motivated and their entire philospoy seems to be to get as much work from everywhere as they can, even if it means making a loss ... anything to take the work from us. That's why everything from the Playstation to mobile phones to the iPod is produced in China.
- About working conditions ... China is one place you do NOT want to work. Workers do seem to be treated fairly well however they are not paid much, if they are not on specific shifts then they will work VERY long hours, even through holidays and very often through the whole weekend. Many of the places they live are really shit by western standards.
Also, the working environment itself is often cramped. Much of the work is manual and there is little or no variation to it, so it's likely to make you brain dead after a while.
Another thing that stinks is that you'll often find employees from Taiwan working there .. they will always be on a higher salary than the local Chinese, even if they are doing the very same job.
Nice people though, they put up with a lot of shit.
Ever try working 5,6, or 7 12-hour shifts in one week? That's 60-82 hours in one week. Sevceral weeks in a row? And thats not considered abuse? What am I supposed to call it? Opportunity?
And then there's this tidbit...
I'll take for granted that the reward system is voluntary by the employer so as to keep the workers "motivated" and "guessing" about what their work is actually "worth". I am also sure that the quality of housing is not in line with that of an American Union worker who puts in a 60-82 hour workweek. And, I'll bet that the housing cost is figured in as part of their pay. We used to do this to coal miners in the USA, where they would go live in a house they rented from the company they worked for and bought their groceries at the company store. It's one of the reasons that Appalachia is so isolated from the rest of the USA culturally. Because the coal mines were in such remote places they had no other opportunities and as a result got locked into a cycle of employed poverty for generation after generation.
And finally, I live in Poughkeepsie NY. Right near the heart of traditional IBM hq. We have chip fabrication ALL OVER this region with NO UNIONS involved. Where are the bloated union electronics factories he speaks of?
A number of separate issues are being fudged in some of these posts...
Q1: Are working conditions in countries such as China perfect by our standards?
A: Obviously not, too strict.
Q2&3: Are working conditions good enough by their standards? Are working conditions better than, for example, working on a peasant farm?
A: Yes, otherwise why would they work there? There's plenty of peasant farms in China -- people are leaving them in droves.
Q3: Will working in such standards help raise the wealth of China so that in years hence they can afford to have our standard of living -- along with real unions, health care, etc.
A: Yes - globalisation in East Asia has brought about the greatest mass liberation from poverty in the history of the planet. For interesting data, check out:
http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/
Click on Human development trends 2005 NEW !
Q4: How would China be without globalisation?
A: Check out Burma or North Korea, both of which are following their own roads to paradise.
Q5: Is the rise of such factories a challenge to labour in developed countries?
A: Yes of course - globalisation is not a zero sum game -- it does make all coutnries better off -- but jobs will go where they can be done cheapest. And that does include a lot of skilled tech jobs.
Q6: Is the rise of China accompanied by extra pollution?
A: You bet.
However, I believe it's worth it overall -- a country as big as China is never going to be raised from poverty through our charity. It needs industry. This will be accompanied, as it was in the West, by pollution, and also by job losses. But everyone reading this has reaped the benefits of industrialisation (computers don't grow on trees), now it's their turn.
There has not been a comparable increase in output compared with the increase in wages and benefits
You're right, although not in the way you want to be. Productivity growth in America has vastly outpaced wage growth since the '70s. This applies across unionized and non-unionized industry alike. It doesn't see a rocket scientist to see that the extra money has wound up in the hands of either shareholders or management (depending on how honest management is). Irrespective of the wage question, the productivity growth is what has kept our economy so healthy over most of the last 30 years.
While economists can debate the question until they're blue in the face, there is a credible argument, which I believe, that wider distribution of productivity gains is better for the economy, because money distributed to poorer people is likely to get spent immediately. Beyond a minimum wage/tax subsidy floor, we clearly don't want to achieve that policy goal through regulation of salaries. The best way to distribute money from productivity gains fairly is by equalizing bargaining power and information between labor and investors. How do you accomplish that? Unions and collective bargaining.
Unions are more necessary than ever if we want all Americans to share in the prosperity that their hard work has created through productivity growth. Just because we're not fighting against a 72-hour workweek anymore doesn't mean the basic reason for the existence of unions, to create equal bargaining power for workers, is any less desirable.
With the theory out of the way, I'll address some of your bogus (and oft-repeated by people who have never belonged to a union) examples. I was a government-employed union transit bus driver from 2000 to 2005 (which was a job I loved, incidentally), so perhaps I can clear up some of the misconceptions.
For example, some government workers get paid 40 hours when they only do 37 hours of work.
It's true that some *salaried* government workers work only 35 or 37.5 hours. Their salaries reflect that; they are paid for 35 or 37.5 hours, not 40. As far as hourly workers go, there are some provisions in some contracts that allow a worker to pick up hours without working -- but those are there to guarantee the full-time worker an 8-hour day when it's administratively simpler (for instance, when a bus run happens to return to the garage after 7 hours and 45 minutes thanks to the schedule) for the government not to set up an eight-hour workday. The unions fought hard for that to prevent management from simply shrinking workers' days down to four hours or less. I don't know of any examples of employers otherwise regularly paying employees for more hours than they work -- why not just raise the hourly rate instead?
Toll-booth workers get upwards of $25 an hour to stand there and hand out tickets.
I can't find any toll-collector wage over $21 in the country. Most of them are closer to $16. It's dirty, repetitive, unrewarding, dangerous (people like to rob tollbooths) and potentially injurious (to hearing, especially) work. Most toll collectors don't hand out tickets (there are machines for that) but count money. Would you consider it progress if we paid them minimum wage, they couldn't afford decent housing anymore, and turnover in these high-accountability positions (lots of cash handled) were suddenly 200%?
Government construction workers get paid somewheres around that same rate to stand around all day (honestly - do you EVER see these guys working?)
Everyone whines about this. So why aren't you on a state road crew? The jobs aren't that hard to get. People complain, but when the chips are down they realize these guys have tough jobs.
If you see a worker standing, it's probably because he's acting as a safety spotter for someone else you can't see. When you're dealing with heavy machinery and dangerous chemicals all day, it's worth