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Behind the Scenes With Samsung's Factory Workers
itwbennett writes "The young women working at Samsung's factory in Tianjin, China like their jobs about as much as factory workers anywhere. The work is boring and tiring, but it pays ok and there are perks (like air conditioning in the dorms), says 19-year-old Zhao Caixia. One 23-year-old woman, who assembles 200-300 camera lenses a day, told the IDG News Service's Michael Kan: 'You just keep doing the same thing over and over. There is nothing really to like, but nothing to really dislike either.' Labor rights group China Labor Watch tells a different story (PDF). One day after Samsung said it would audit its suppliers in China, the group reported cases of excessive overtime (exceeding 100 hours per month) and exhausting working conditions, with employees being made to stand for up to 12 hours for a single shift."
But I'm pretty sure that when I lived in crapsack podunk land as a teenager, I had stood for 12 hours in a single shift working at the shithole state fair cleaning barns for not much more than minimum wage.
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what do you expect?
its a factory assembly job with very low entry requirements, just like everywhere else, you do your thing, all day every day, for a modest pay that can support your family if your not living beyond your means.
surprise!
now if we can get Americans to accept that "detailing cars" is not a 50$ an hour job maybe we can regain our strength
Why would we care about working conditions at a non-Apple factory?
I mean, Apple invented near slave labor conditions in China to build iProducts. Pretty sure Apple should take them to court for infringing on the "method of using Chinese for slave labor to build electronic devices while also increasing the suicide rate" patent
They should deploy minimum wage and laws on safe work conditions so that employer cannot exploit their situations.
I came here just to say this. At one factory where I worked 12 hour days seven days a week with three days off was the normal schedule. They made armored military vehicles for the US Army, so most of the time people were walking around for parts or welding in odd positions.
The trucking fleet worked the legal maximum to save money: 14 hours a day six days a week.
Equipment costs more than the people that run them, so the equipment keeps going whether the workers are fatigued or not.
Is it just me or does "assembling camera lenses" (among other things) sound like something that could be mechanized? I mean, it's not like the lens needs to be different from phone to phone and I'm sure the same could be said for many other parts.
I'm not trying to say that these people should be put out of a job, but wouldn't it be better if some of them could have a lot more job satisfaction from better, more interesting work, with real responsibilities, where they are more than just assembly monkeys? ...and then use that to build a better economic system for themselves where a lot more people can have more rewarding careers?
Yes, it all sounds very crap to work there. But what are the alternatives?
1) The human workers are replaced by robots - this is unlikely to happen since human labor in China is so plentiful and desperate as to make it actually cheaper to "run" humans than robots. But even if it did eventually happen, you'd end up with a whole lot of people without work (and all the associated problems this creates). Menial factory work at least gives them something to do, even if their lives exist solely for someone else's profit.
2) Improve conditions, reasonable work hours, etc - sounds great, except that if one factory does this, another factory will advertise how they haven't, and so businesses will go to the other factory as they wouldn't have to deal with the reduced output and increased costs of having to treat humans like... well, humans.
3) Improvement of conditions, reasonable work hours via Government mandate - so the factories don't have any choice now and are forced to treat people like they should (more or less). Great, except that this will rise the cost of the products created and the costs will naturally be passed onto consumers in first-world countries. The electronics we buy are as cheap as they are precisely in a large part due to the slave work done in countries far away from us. Would people complain if prices went up as conditions in said countries improved? Damn right they would, unfortunately.
So what do you do? You could buy local, or at least try to. Sometimes that works, but in most cases it's not even possible, and odds are you'll find components that were sourced from the less desirable factories anyway. You can't win, short of abandoning almost all forms of modern electronic equipment. There simply isn't enough pressure to change the statue quo.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Assemblling 200 lenses per day of flipping 200 burgers per day? Which one is better for the country?
The real reason for the rounded corners: So workers can't slash their wrists with an iPad.
yep! it's just that robots don't have a union.
Um...so? I was working at the age of 14, and had a normal non-farm job at the age of 16 (worked at a grocery store). Just because we don't expect people to be anything other than helpless children until age 26 or so these days, doesn't mean that less than 26 years ago teens had jobs. And while yes, it wasn't until I was 19 that I worked at a factory, it really didn't kill me. For serious.
What kind of "China Labor Watch" would they be if they reported everything was OK? They have an incentive to report bad news, and spin everything in a negative direction. For all we know, they could be like NPR and think they don't even need evidence, engaging in outright fabrication. And why not? It supports their pre-existing mental state. "We didn't think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story."
Hey, I'm not saying Chinese factories are heaven. Even in America, factories that are unionized and obey every OSHA rule are still not particularly pleasant places to work. But the "big name" factories in China have the best working conditions, hands down. I've been to the little ones and they can be hell. If the boss thinks of himself as father to the workers, the small factories can be quite nice. But when he thinks of himself as the only smart person in the company, and the workers as reprehensible (think of it like the way liberals consider middle Americans), things can get bad. Come on, this China Labor Watch isn't going after the bad factories. It's just going after the big names to get publicity for itself. If they were actually interested in fixing things, they'd have no trouble swinging a 2x4 in China and hitting several factories that need to be exposed. But they're not interested in that, eh?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Nobody came to my help when I worked 80 hours a week for five months straight.
-]Phreak Out[-
Should we not expect ... XYZ... paid for by Samsung?
All of these are things Apple has done with FoxConn.
If Samsung would do the same, won't it risk suits of... ripping off what Apple did?
</grin>
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Menial factory work at least gives them something to do, even if their lives exist solely for someone else's profit.
Boom. There. Right there. There's your problem. If you're a fellow American, if you're a fellow member of Western Civilization, how does that not offend you to your core? "Their lives exist solely for someone else's profit" is the working definition of slavery. How can you possibly find this to be an acceptable situation?
Improvement of conditions, reasonable work hours via Government mandate
Which is how we ended child labor and instituted the 40 hour work week in this country, BTW...
Great, except that this will rise the cost of the products created and the costs will naturally be passed onto consumers in first-world countries.
Common misconception. Prices are set not by what the costs of production are but by what the market will bear. Ever hear a company say, "Our costs allow us to make a 300% markup, but we felt that amount of profit was unconscionable, so we marked the price down..."?Rising production costs don't get passed on to the consumer because the price is already set at the maximum the market will allow.
The electronics we buy are as cheap as they are precisely in a large part due to the slave work done in countries far away from us. Would people complain if prices went up as conditions in said countries improved? Damn right they would, unfortunately.
God Help Us, then let them complain. Let's call this the "Papa John" principle. When Papa John complained last month that providing his workers with healthcare would cost an extra quarter per pizza, the first thing that came to my mind was "Cool. You mean I can ensure my pizza guy doesn't have tuberculosis for an extra quarter? What can we get those poor guys if I kick in fifty cents?"
Seriously, if I pay an extra 20 bucks for my iPhone, I can eliminate slavery in China? Good grief. Bill me. If I kick in $40, can I free the North Koreans too?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I worked construction for a few summers after high school -- 12 hour shifts weren't uncommon (on my feet the whole time)
Come again, buddy??
I worked in construction sites every summer during my college years, for I desperately needed money to pay for books and food and shelter
From scaffolding to steel framing high rises, never did I have to be on my feet for the entire 12 hour shift
Which job were you in, buddy?
I worked for a heavy construction company, primarily doing road construction - doing things like shoveling asphalt that fell out of the paver, raking down stone to level it, pressure washing mud off the heavy equipment before loading it for transport to another job site, directing trucks to dump their load where it was needed, subbing in for flagman when needed, etc. About the only time I got to sit down was when I had to drive to pick up parts or, when I was lucky, get a cushy job escorting heavy/wide loads.
i wish inverse democracy worked - in the sense that the act of voting determines the quality of the candidates
It does, if you don't vote for the lesser evil. It is when people start talking about "strategic voting" instead of voting what you actually believe in regardless of outcome that the democracy goes to hell.
A vote for something you don't believe in is worse than not voting at all.
Not only do you get every single cost dumped onto you, you also get to deal with things without the benefits of a large scale company, or the ability to look beyond the end of the short contract.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's normally referred to as civil works, a distinction because of the lack of skills required in labour. Construction work is separate due to the skills required even in labouring work. I have done 12 hour shifts on a production like, fortunately with an agile mind and vivid imagination, it was easy to park my body on the task at hand whilst my mind was elsewhere. Still it is easy based upon my experience to see where RSI comes from and it logical long term consequences upon people who lack the intellectual ability to move on. That lack of intellect should not be a reason to exploit, leave the in a dead end position which they will not be able to sustain till retirement and to give them no real future.
We is it contrary to right wing bullshit, those that work the hardest in the most undesirable jobs get paid the least and those that put in the least real effort in the most desirable jobs get paid the most. A fair and honest society recognises this and makes an adjustment, an inherently insane, deceitful and dishonest society simply exploits the situation. Turns human beings into drones working in poverty, to be ruthlessly exploited unto death.
What ever happened to the lie about increased productivity and automation, it would seem the benefits only got shared amongst the top psychopathic 1% and the rest simply got screwed over. It's time to start nailing the 1% and teach them a thing or two about being ruthlessly exploited.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I find it very hard to ascertain what the facts are when it comes to China. One very big reason is that there are so many groups with an extreme anti-China agenda, who will invent or distort just about any tall tale to support their claims; I don't think I need to dig out any references - they must be well known by now. So can we trust what "Labor rights group China Labor Watch" have to say? I don't know.
So, to me it is back to what seems plausible. That factory workers in China seem to regard their work in the same way as any factory worker in the West does - that seems plausible to me. It is not unlikely that they are expected to work much harder than we are used to - the Chinese I know personally all have an unbelievable work discipline. Just to compare: I've had a British builder do some work on my house; he turned up around 9 am and left around 5 pm after doing some quite decent work. I've recently had a Chinese builder do a similar sort of job, to the same standard; but he didn't leave until around 8 pm. I think it is simply in their culture to work very hard, and what would feel like unreasonable to an American or European may seem quite reasonable to a Chinese.
And it takes a surprisingly small number of minority votes to change a candidate's opinion. The difference between the two front runners in a lot of elections is well under 10%, often under 1%. If 2% of the population vote for a single issue candidate, then next time around one or both candidates will realise that they can get an extra 2% of the vote by adopting those policies and that would be enough to swing the election. Unfortunately, in the USA, these issues tend to be things like abortion and gay marriage, not things that actually affect most people.
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I wonder what happens to the Marxist ideal of workers controlling the means of production when all of the work is done by robots...
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That's for the phone itself. The icons are round so the workers inside the phone can't slash their wrists.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
"lack the intellectual ability to move on" Who said they lack the intellectual capacity, I don't think there are that many jobs that pay as well as these assembly jobs. They get paid the going rate or above it, and have subsidised housing and food. Without these job many would be in small towns farming earning even less and in poorer working conditions.
These days, if you don't vote for the lesser evil, you don't vote.
I am voting for Cthulhu for President. Why vote for a lesser evil?
*duck* ... I am sorry, but it had to be said!