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Photos of Chinese Sweatshop Used By Microsoft
MongooseCN has a follow-up to last week's Chinese Sweatshop story. He says "The image Microsoft doesn't want you to see: Too tired to stay awake. These Chinese workers earn just 34p an hour (about 52 cents in US dollars), work 15-hour shifts, and deal with other abuses to package US-made products."
Is this picture genuine? I'm inclined to think not. Having lived in Shanghai for a while, I can attest to a culture of after lunch naps in China, in an office where software engineers earn many times as much. I was quite surprised the first time I came back to the office after lunch, to find people strewn across their desks, or heads back on chairs. I was looking for our QA Lead one day and thought maybe he was off on holiday. No: he was snoozing on something like a yoga matt under the desk of an empty cubicle at the back of the office.
Really, don't trust the Daily Mail.
This reminds me of the time I worked in a Sony TV manufacturing plant for 4 months. No heating or air conditioning, dirty restrooms, 12 hour shift where I'd gladly nap during my 10 and 30 minute breaks. The cafeteria basically only had snacks. Monotonous work. No sitting or resting outside of your breaks. Oh wait, this was in San Diego, California. Guess what, manual labor jobs suck? Congratulations! Of course I'm sure it's worse where OSHA isn't breathing down a company's neck, but is this really news? Did anyone expect Microsoft to *not* have these kinds of places?
This is all meaningless, the factory will get slapped on the wrist, the workers will lose their jobs and microsoft will make a comment about taking such accusations 'seriously' and that they are 'investigating'. The public will be outraged for a month or two before forgetting which large corporation they are supposed to hate this month. Then the news media will go away and at the next contract renewal the whole job will get bid out again.
The reason it is meaningless is because the Chinese system of contract factories will at most simply shift the work to another factory - in China. The lax oversight, weak wages and rampant corruption in the system that allowed this kind of thing to happen in the first place remain. The only way to fix the issue is to stop production in China altogether and shift production to another country. That is the only thing that could possibly get the Chinese government to give a damn. Until companies start to shift work out of China and into a country that isn't inherently corrupt it just a game of whack a mole.
All that being said, the same factory, with the same management, employing the same people could still easily rebid and get the next contract simply by playing around with the paperwork on who owns the factory.
Reminds me of this North Korean propaganda film I saw some while back, which was a story about a South Korean girl who had to sell her eyes to save her dad (from what, I can't quite remember, but does it matter?).
Not everything is what it is made out to be.
Yeah, I actually agree. Long shitty hours are pretty much par for an industrial revolution. China has a problem in that it hasn't developed enough of a middle class where it can be anything other than the cheap-o manufacturing center of the world. As their wages rise, it gets rougher to maintain their position as world factory. All developed nations go through it, but China is trying to do it in a very short timespan. When alls you have going for you is that you are cheap you need to be, well, cheap, at least until your middle class can take up some slack.
So, the fact that they work long shitty days is too bad, but the alternative is to look like Africa. This is life.
The real tragedy as the parent points out is that they are making it shittier than it has to be. Doing stupid shit like not letting your employees talk as they do a mind numbing job for 16 hours is not just malicious, it isn't productive. Anything to break up the tedium is going to make your employees more productive. I have heard this complaint far more than once when I talk to folk who do business in China that managers are simply sadistic for the sake of being sadistic. It is ingrain in their management cultural treating your employees like shit is a good thing, even when there is no conceivable business reason to do it. Certainly it isn't every single manager in China, but it is a non-trivial problem. Their manager class culture is just a dozen ways fucked up, and they make a shitty industrial revolution far more miserable than it has to be.
Most chinese factories work like this: You're hired at what seems like a good wage for eight hours. Only then you find out you are given quotas that you can't complete unless you work 80 or 90 hours a week, with unpaid overtime. In some slave labor camps, you are paid room and board and then given your wages at the end of a year contract, and they only need to find three infractions under the law to kick you out of your dormitory and not pay you a dime.
And if you're wondering why your wages are less than what your parents made, adjusted for purchasing power, then you are ignoring the answer. I do not want to compete with someone willing to work for $100 a month in such deplorable conditions, whose environment looks like this.
I'd rather have less stuff.
The scam of externalizing real costs to the next generation is worse than giving them a national deficit, because it could take hundreds of years to undo the damage, and much more money than we thought we saved.
According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
The GDP in US dollars per capita of China is $3,566.
The GDP in US dollars per capita of the US is 46,584.
Simple math, using the $.52 per hour estimate from the "article" shows that the Chinese workers are making approximately: (.52 * 46584)/3566 = $6.79 per hour equivalent to US dollars. That isn't real bad. Plus, if you read the original article, you will find that the job also provides free food and board for their workers. Every two hours they get a 10 minute nap. They get 1.5 hour lunch breaks. In China this is a cushy job. It certainly isn't "slave labor" as some people are claiming.
I'm all for the worker and believe the people should stand up and push the laws to legalize unions so they can get better working conditions. But where are the pictures that Microsoft doesn't want us to see?? Is it that one picture where people are sleeping on the job? These pictures just don't do the cause any justice. Especially when I've recently seen highly paid people sleeping on the job http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/toronto/archive/2010/01/22/ttc-napper-under-investigation.aspx
Looks like they forgot about that again?
Actually no. If you read the articles linked on Slashdot, none of Foxconn's supplies they use in factories that supply Apple have been involved here. In fact, while Foxconn is listed in the report, they are not listed in the in depth list of companies, so one or the other is an error. While I remain skeptical that Apple will persist in the level of auditing they have been employing, so far they've been doing well. Apple is doing what we want companies to do, audit their suppliers and force them to stop mistreating workers or lose their contracts to companies who will treat workers humanely.
It makes me very sad to see these kind of comments. If Apple gets badmouthed and bad press for doing the right thing and investigating human rights abuses, why should they continue doing it from a business perspective? If Microsoft can ignore the human rights abuses and look the other way and get less bad press as a result, that's the best business move. You sir, are part of the problem.
A few weeks slashdot posted the story about "Chinese Reactions To Google Leaving China."
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/03/26/0147222/Chinese-Reactions-To-Google-Leaving-China
A lot of posters insisted that the Chinese liked their government, and wouldn't have it any other way.
This is a little hard for me to understand. Do Chinese really believe that these brutally inhumane conditions are superior to western culture?
No, it's not just a matter of napping after work. It is seriously inhumane treatment.
The mostly female workers, aged 18 to 25, work from 7.45am to 10.55pm, sometimes with 1,000 workers crammed into one 105ft by 105ft room.
They are not allowed to talk or listen to music, are forced to eat substandard meals from the factory cafeterias, have no bathroom breaks during their shifts and must clean the toilets as discipline, according to the NLC.
My wife works for the British NHS - the following is a comparison.
She is regularly rostered in for 12.5 hour shifts, but is required to stay until the patient she is handling has been dealt with - if she takes on an A&E case 30 minutes before she is scheduled to finish, that case can take up to 4 hours to conclude, and she is not allowed to leave until then. She is still required to turn up for the next shift on time.
She is not allowed to take extended breaks, short comfort breaks are all she is permitted and any meals she takes are routinely interrupted - the longest she has had to eat a meal in the past 6 months is 20 minutes uninterrupted.
She is regularly pressured by the Trust to declare that she has not worked past her legal limit, even though they both know that she was rostered on to work way past that limit.
She has to pay money to a private, non-government body to be able to practice in the UK - she cannot practice without GMC membership.
She cannot become GMC qualified without being trained by the government - there is no alternative to the government workplace for doctors in the UK.
She does not get to plan her holidays, she gets told when she is on holiday, sometimes without any notice (she was told she was on holiday last week on the friday before).
And she gets paid less than the night security staff.
Oh, and shes responsible for the lives of her patients during all of this - any mistakes she makes and that's potentially her livelihood out of the window. Tiredness and overwork is not an excuse, but neither is refusing to work the NHS roster.
My point? The western world has its own little sweat shops and no one gives a damn.
You raise a valid argument, but I think you also need to consider lifestyle. I don't have any qualms with feeding somebody in the 3rd world as opposed to allowing somebody in the US to buy a 3rd car. However, it seems like these wages don't even allow a basic standard of living.
The fact that many in China are much worse off doesn't change the fact that those working in these factories don't have even the most basic amenities.
Products built under these conditions ought to be tariffed. No, they don't need to pay for every employee to have half an acre with four bedrooms and two cars. However, three meals a day with basic nutrition with at least 8 hours of sleep and 15 minute breaks every four hours are not an unreasonable standard to require. That would probably cost Microsoft all of 0.1 cents per mouse or something like that.
Every country has income disparity - that will never change. However, even the unemployed (and likely the homeless) in the US live in better conditions than those in these factories.
Once again: China is communist in name only.
You could say the same thing about any Communist nation which has ever existed, and I've heard people make that argument. It's just another example of the No-True-Scotsman fallacy.
(although, to be fair, in the case of China, at present, you're probably right)
Their manager class culture is just a dozen ways fucked up, and they make a shitty industrial revolution far more miserable than it has to be.
Once there are enough jobs for everyone that wants one, then it will change, as employees who have a choice will exercise that choice. Henry Ford figured it out that if you pay people more than minimum, and actually a decent wage with decent working conditions, they will tolerate the most boring job in the world. Of course, first he tried it the old fashioned way with goons and low pay, until he finally tired of paying so much to train new people and cover people out "sick" for the day.
Again, compare it to the American/European Industrial Revolution and it is easy to see that while it sucks, it sucks less. When I saw that photo, I was thinking, "Wow, at least they have decent lighting to do their work in.".
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Idealists can run easily run a corporation at a profit. Fools can not. I've got a Buddhist friend who owns a medium sized bakery business that specifically employs ex-cons, runaways, homeless folks, and so forth. He operates it at a small, reasonable profit. He isn't rich, but he is comfortable. Stock portfolios containing only socially responsible, environmentally friendly corporations have been around for at least three decades, and they have done well enough that people keep investing in them.
The idea that you can't be an idealist and make a profit is an idea promulgated by selfish bastards who don't give a rat's ass about the well being of others. It's a cop out, nothing more. Just admit that you aren't an idealist and you don't care about others; you don't need to put idealists down just because you aren't one.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
1. Provide a stable government which supports individual liberty and encourages entrepreneurship while regulating industry to avoid environmental and social abuses.
FTFY
If you can read this Chinese article (and some others on the Web,) the company was investigated right after the report by the local labor department and the press. It is found that (a) workers 16-18 year-old are allowed to work under Chinese law, but must be registered with the labor department and the company failed to register them; (b) the wage is the minimum legal wage of the city; (c) the workers need to work 8 hours day time and 2-3 hours OT; (d) the workers are allowed rest-room breaks. Of course, you won't read these follow-ups in the Western press where everything about China is sensationalized, and you can also dismiss the follow-up investigation as cover-up.
And for this image, maybe one can also interpret it as the workers taking a break at work?
Don't say "corporations". In any corporation there are a small handful of *people* who are the executives and actually set policy and run the show. Motivations of intelligent people are complex and cannot be predicted using simple litmus tests. I've seen executives who have made seriously unethical business decisions also exhibit signs of tremendous compassion and empathy.
Every man is the hero of his own story, and human beings have a natural tendency to reciprocate the confidence that you place in them. Appealing to someone's good nature may not always work, but but demonizing them and trivializing their motivations *never* will. I'm not an idealist. I'm just pointing out your attitude is far too simplistic. It fosters a kind of us-versus-them groupthink that can never lead to anything but useless conflict.