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High Tech Misery In China
theodp writes "Think you've got a bad job? Think again. You could be making keyboards for IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo and HP at Meitai Plastic and Electronics, a Chinese hardware factory. Prompted by the release of High Tech Misery in China by a human-rights group, a self-regulating body set up by tech companies will conduct an audit of working conditions at the factory. In return for take-home pay of 41 cents per hour, workers reportedly sit on hard wooden stools for 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Overtime is mandatory, with workers being given on average two days off per month. While on the production line, workers are not allowed to raise their hands or heads, are given 1.1 seconds to snap each key into place, and are encouraged to 'actively monitor each other' to see if any company rules are being transgressed. They are also monitored by guards. Workers are fined if they break the rules, locked in the factory for four days per week, and sleep in crowded dormitories. Okay, it's not all bad news — they're hiring."
we have to pay for coffee!
Horrible working conditions in China, film at 11.
Sad that this stuff is so common; let's see if it changes over time as the country develops
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Foreign companies that utilize this type of thing should be hit with heavy penalties. This would also encourage them to check working conditions before signing a contract with a manufacturer.
In return for take-home pay of 41 cents per hour, workers reportedly sit on hard wooden stools for 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. Overtime is mandatory, with workers being given on average two days off per month.
The alternatives being what?
Substinence farming or starving?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
1) Government regulation (and enforcement) setting minimum working conditions.
2) Enthusiastic uptake of some kind of "no humans were exploited in the making of this product" sticker, in the free market.
I've found it heartwarming at work that the younger staff are all hugely in favour of "fair trade" products that purportedly don't exploit poor farmers and farm labourers, mostly as applied to coffee and sugar products. The aggressively seek them out and we have people coming from floors around to our "fair trade only" coffee station. We older folks are "for" this stuff as long as you stick it under our noses, shame us a bit, and it doesn't cost *much* more.
Which it doesn't, of course - that's the pathetic thing about these stories - the conditions in that factory, as opposed to conditions that might not pass muster here but at least wouldn't *disgust* you, are probably scraping $2 off the cost of the $60 "MS Egronomic 4000" keyboard that you could only pry from my cold, dead (non-RSI'd) fingers. I'd be happy to pay $65 if it came with such a sticker...the other $3 paying for the checking and enforcement of the rules from the sticker-issuing NGO.
It cost you $2.99. What the heck do you think?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I think I'm safe, the IBM keyboard I'm typing this on was made in Thailand.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
No, you're seeing totalitarianism gone wild. All of the shitty labor in China is backstopped by the government and its willingness to create political prisoners.
What really sucked about the Olympics wasn't the smog or anything else, it was the media broadcasting the fake news that China is just another free country. And the west sucked it down.
Capitalism can only work because it thrives on and creates the poor.
We wouldn't be in the mess we're in without it.
Call me a troll or flame me, but there has to be a better way than chasing the profit...
Sustainability perhaps?
Watch those corners
The US could do this, if China didn't have us under its collective thumb. We can't embargo anybody until we're no longer so deeply in debt to them.
To be honest, I thought they had machines that pop keys on and assemble these things - but I suppose over there people are cheaper than machines.
OK, so we've accounted for not more that .2 percent of the cost of a keyboard. Realistically this is much less because I've seen very few $10 keyboards.
Maybe we should also ask, where does the rest of the money go? I can't think of the last time I paid less than $1 for a keyboard. Even retail apparel margins aren't that good, perhaps some tech executives need to take a look at their cost structures...
Blaming this on the Chinese while still exploiting things is bullshit.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
... We no longer expected a free keyboard with our new PCs? The companies on the list are all major PC manufacturers, so a large number of those keyboards are probably the cheap ones that are provided with new computers. But do we really need a new keyboard with every new PC?
After all, a large fraction of all the new PCs purchased today are purchased to replace existing systems; which themselves had keyboards before. And being as keyboards themselves have not changed dramatically in the past 10 years (or more), there is a good chance that the consumer could have just used the keyboard from their old system on their new one.
The throw-away mentality towards consumer electronics is likely a major culprit in the development of these sweatshops.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I would love to call bullshit on this, but sadly I can't. Don't get me wrong I love the idea of capitalism and the relative plenty I have lived with because of it, but it only works if the working class is doing well enough to buy some goods.
perhaps I am rambling already, but this hits close to home for me. When I was a guitar playing, electronics geeking, jr. high student I found out that one of the worlds biggest audio electronics manufacturers had its headquarters about 10 miles away. As soon as I turned 18 and qualified to work there I started to chase it a little bit. Soon I was testing digital audio electronics and making more money than I had thought possible (for my age and experience I mean). My job was exciting (at least to me) and I could afford to live in a small apartment with one of my best friends from the factory. Everything was going great.
Well the company went after some major buyouts and a few of the new products flopped. 9/11 happened and people stopped purchasing entertainment related items like the recording equipment we were making. The company was de-listed from the nasdaq and things started to go downhill. There had been several competitors with production facilities nearby. Soon we were the only one. They had all moved to contract manufacturing in china. Our company faced the decision to either do the same or collapse completely. To the stockholders it was a no-brainer. They moved the production to china putting us all out of work.
I had been making about 150 dollars a day, for the first four ten hour shifts of the week, and if I worked friday and or saturday it was $225. I was told the man who gets my job in china will make the equivalent of 150 dollars a month, for working 14+ hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, living in some shitty dorms. I remember my hands aching from the job, and people were always needing surgery on their wrists, and that was with 40 to 60 hour weeks, I can't imagine the schedule in china. If they can't do the job though, there are people lined up around the block to take their place.
well some years have passed now, and it has been wild. I figured I had a career in electronics manufacturing, but there are really no factories in this area anymore. There used to be hundreds. I had to move back with my parents or be homeless, and I had to come up with a new career path. It has taken years to get qualified in some other type of work that is actually stable, its not nearly as much fun, but my bills are finally paid again.
As for the company, the quality of the product went to shit, people quit buying, they are a very small company now. Very few of the original people still survive there. Even the china production is very small now.
The dilemma for me is when I am out buying tools for my latest job, or when I am buying electronics, I picture whats going on in china and it makes me sick. But I go to the store and look around, and I no longer have the choice to buy from a country that respects the workers a little bit. Even if there were lots of American, Canadian, British, etc, keyboards around, I doubt I could afford them with my paycheck from the new career... so the house of cards continues to crumble.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Concerning orders of magnitude, it wouldn't hurt if some of the posts to slashdot were an order of magnitude less stupid.
TFA states these workers are being paid 41 cents/hour to work 84 hour weeks. Let's pay them 82 cents/hour to work 42 hour weeks. This will require twice as many workers, working shifts half as long, and double the labour cost for each keyboard.
100 key keyboard at 1.1s per key is 110s, which is under 2 minutes. Original labour cost is 1.3 cents/keyboard. Under the relatively humane proposal, this doubles to 2.6 cents per keyboard.
It would take six intermediaries between China and the U.S market to each mark-up this additional labour by 100% for the humane labour practise to add $1 to the cost of a keyboard landed to the consumer.
I've heard a rumour that Walmart doesn't have six intermediaries in their supply chain, and those they do have rarely get away with 100% markups.
This has nothing to do with the economics of production. It has a lot more to do with Chinese society having pockets of corruption where everyone with the power to put a stop to this turns a blind eye to enslavement conditions, and powerful corporations turning a blind eye to the greater powers in China not doing much about this.
Even Detroit would have difficulty coming up with a way to make a $10 keyboard cost $100. $40/hour with a production rate of two keyboards per hour and markups galore?
I once heard that decimation has come to mean either 90% attrition or 10% attrition. Contrary to popular opinion and Walmart shopping tendencies, it's not actually true that an "order of magnitude" is 10%
It did in the USA, the UK, and every other country that went through a transition from a mostly agricultural to an industrial economy.
And by then, as the cost of labor raises with the working condition, instead of building the same hardware in better conditions, the big companies will relocate their production facilities somewhere else where the cost of producing the parts is even cheaper than everywhere else. Probably in Africa.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I prioritize the safety and health of humans above getting a $5 keyboard on NewEgg.com. I don't share your heartlessness which places profit above humanity. As a detail, it costs surprisingly little to make sure humans have a decent living, health care, potable water, food security, a safe place to live, and other things these keyboard assembly workers lack.
My problem with paying more is that I have no reasonable assurance that the additional money will get to the workers. I don't trust "trickle down" economics but I'm willing to pay more for the products and services I use so that workers get better treatment. If I said to any distributor or manufacturer to charge me more they might do it. But I think they'll keep everything as it is and then pocket the additional money. Not one penny of my money would go toward improving the plight of abused workers anywhere along the chain that gets me my keyboards.
To me, this is the hard part of an ethical sell on the public. Everyone has a pretty good idea of what a safe working environment is (it's why so many are appalled at the conditions described in TFA), and there's lots of people around the world who can go into well-researched detail to explain more on that (such as Charles Kernaghan's exemplary work; see "The Corporation" for more of his work. It's one of the best movies on this and its relationship to the larger picture of the problem with a system based on satisfying profit-seekers at all costs). As a result, when I watch what the corporate media doesn't want me to read or see, I get lots of talk about what to avoid.
But I don't know of a simple, practical, efficient guide for the consumer looking for computer parts. I need to buy a few USB compatible-with-everything keyboards I can plug in and use without any additional software. Furthermore, I need to have a reasonable understanding that these keyboards were manufactured and shipped without abuse to the workers. Where do I get these?
Digital Citizen
"Reform happened because it became economically feasible, thanks to capital investment that increased the productivity of labor."
We would like to think that we ended slavery and nasty labor conditions because we've grown more humane and ethical. The reality is that the wind sail put the galley slave out out commission because it was cheaper to buy and maintain the sails than it is to maintain the slaves. It's cheaper to use machines to use slaves or underpaid workers to mine.
I always laugh at those star trek or scifi shows where some advanced race is using living slaves to work hard labor. It hadn't occurred to the writers that even in the complete absence of ethics, it just makes no sense to use humans to do brute labor.