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The Forbidden City of Terry Gou
ElvaWSJ writes "Hon Hai churns out iPhones and Wiis, and provides a window into China's secretive world of outsourcing and manufacturing. With a work force of some 270,000 — about as big as the population of Newark, N.J. — the factory is a bustling testament to the ambition of Hon Hai's founder, Terry Gou. In an era when manufacturing has been defined by outsourcing, no one has done more to shift global electronics production to China. Little noticed by the wider world, Mr. Gou has turned his company into China's biggest exporter and the world's biggest contract manufacturer of electronics."
Wired had a great photo gallery of factories and assembly lines in China.
And here is a write-up about someone from Chumby Industries visiting Shenzhen to get their production line up-to-date. It's more about the area than anything about the factory.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
We had those in the US at one time - they were called Company Towns.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I guess you didn't read the article.
They get paid $0.60 an hour (a lot in China), but they also get to live rent free, their food is subsidized, and they have free health care. They also get overtime pay and actually do get raises. I wouldn't mind that deal, if I were just starting out of high school and needed to work.
The did in the early days of American Manufacturing - Company Towns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Although here, they were more traditionally mining and refining businesses, not outright manufacturing.
Hon Hai is known for paying above the regional average and maintaining safer than average working environments. A far cry from living in a comfortable bungalow in California, but it's certainly much better than the average treatment employees get in China.
I don't know about Shenzhen or most of the rest of China, but where I came from in Asia the work day is 6 days a week, 8-10 hours a day. Overtime is paid at par (i.e. there is no bonus), but people love it anyway. Workers in these factory-cities don't have much of a life besides making money and sending most of it back home - so an opportunity to make even more cash with time they wouldn't spent doing diddly squat anyways seems appealing.
Some companies pay out mid-year bonuses based on company performance. This can sometimes be worth up to 4 months of normal wages. It's a cultural thing that simply doesn't exist in North America, and it's like a little Christmas in the middle of the fiscal year.
The people had already flocked to the city because they had been evicted from their pastoral livelihood by the Enclosure Laws. The industrial revolution happened substantially due to the critical mass of effectively starved humans ready to make the toil economically and emotionally feasible.
And there were no machines on the farms until the late nineteenth century.
Bread only becomes critical on the farm when the cities find it necessary to keep their machine-minder's bellies full. I am not saying the expropriation of labor by capital is not essential. There is no interpretive value in pretending that it is something other than it is for the sake of whitewashing the motives of the haute bourgeoisie.
illegitimii non ingravare
US union members DIED by the dozen for our 8 hour working days.
In fact, May 1 as an international day for international labor demonstrations was a direct result of the US labor movements demonstrations for 8 hour working days and the resulting bloodshed.
I find it sad that so few Americans actually know anything about how the US used to be at the forefront of the fights for workers rights, and the large number of lives lost in fighting your government and industry to get the protections you have now. It is one of the things you truly have to be proud of, as it had a significant impact on labor movements worldwide and so directly affected workers rights throughout the industrialized world.
They are not illegal in China (at least not the "official" ones), but the government controls all of them (in Soviet Russia the union controls you...or something like that) so the unions in China are more for keeping the workers in line than working on behalf of the workers. Why do you suppose that the only country where Walmart has not objected to unionization is China?
I just want to add that I have, unfortunately, seen the insides of three hospitals in China. The BeiDa University hospital at Xizhimen in Beijing, the military hospital for musculoskeletal injuries in Wuhan, and Beijing United Family hospital. The only hospital of those three I would ever want to end up again is the third, because it is for foreigners, and they charge foreign rates for service. Have you been in a Chinese hospital? Well, you too can experience the delight of paying to use the elevator despite having a serious knee injury (happened to me). Need to get an antibiotic injection? The public hospitals have older/less potent medicines. Instead of getting a one time injection, I had to go to the hospital for 45 minutes on three days and have an IV drip hooked up. Not to mention the insides of the public hospitals are not sanitary at all and quite dirty.
I'd say that life expectancy here is due to a mostly healthy diet (low sugar, saturated fat, plenty of vegetables) and lots of exercise. I'm curious how the CIA got the life expectancy statistic, because you cannot really trust the government here regarding any such statistics.
That all said, I still love living here, but offer me another silly rebuttal that is too academic, and I will be happy to blow it out of the water.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.