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Subscribe to RSSZHENGZHOU, China -- In the eight years since Zhang Shuxiang first left her village in the poor interior of central China, she worked in 20 factories before coming to the assembly line of a Foxconn plant making products for tech firms including Apple. She wants it to be her last.
The 26-year-old has worked in factories making products as varied as coffee makers, jewelry and Apple's LED screens. Each time, she quit, blaming low wages and unreasonable supervisors, then joined another factory.
Reuters
In eight years, Zhang Shuxiang -- seen posing for a photograph at her home in Zhengzhou, China, on Wednesday -- has worked in 20 factories. She wants the Foxconn plant to be her last.
"Factory work is too tiring," she said when asked about life after Foxconn, which she plans to leave by June. "Since last year, I've kept on telling myself I would never want to enter a factory ever again, but I'm still doing it in spite of myself."
She embodies the shifting expectations and opportunities of tens of millions of young Chinese workers from the countryside who have turned their country into a workshop of the world.
Their changing attitudes pose a deep challenge for thousands of manufacturers, such as Foxconn and its big customer Apple, which have relied on what they once thought was a virtually endless stream of inexpensive, compliant workers.
Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou has pledged to keep on increasing worker salaries and cutting the hours of work, after it came under fire for poor working conditions for employees making Apple iPhones and iPads.
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Zhang now works on an assembly line for computer motherboards, in a factory inside a mammoth industrial complex on the outskirts of Zhengzhou, which Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook visited in late March during a trip to China.
CNBC's Jon Fortt takes a closer look at the Foxconn violations noted by the Fair Labor Association.
Before finally deciding whether to quit, Zhang said she will wait to see what changes come from the agreement signed by Foxconn and Apple to improve working conditions.
Workers more aware of rights
Meeting the aspirations of Zhang and other migrant workers who power China's economy -- officially estimated at 159 million -- is crucial for the government. Younger, better educated and more tech-savvy, many migrant workers grew up as the sole children in their families and are less accepting than their parents were of tough working conditions.
They are also becoming more aware of their rights and of the widening growing range of available jobs, including services, that has come with rapid economic growth and which offer a way out of the relentless tedium of factory work.
Rev. Serene Jones, New York University law professor Cynthia Estlund, and Columbia University visiting scholar Obery Hendricks discuss the legacy left by Apple founder Steve Jobs and the controversy over the working conditions of his company's supplier, Foxconn.
"They are willing to take collective action, strikes, work stoppages, protests when they feel their rights have been violated or what they are owed has not been given to them," said Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for Hong Kong-based workers' rights group China Labor Bulletin.
"Workers know that if they stand their ground and ask for better pay and conditions, employers ... have to agree to some of their demands," he added.
Apple, supplier pledge to improve conditions
Duncan Innes-Ker, senior China analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit, said there is a "perfect storm of factors" coming together to support workers as they push for higher wages: sustained economic growth, government policy support for a higher minimum wage and demographics.
Joe Tan / Reuters, file
Employees eat their meal on a guardrail of a bridge near the Foxconn recruitment center in Shenzhen, Guangdong province in this Feb. 22 file photo.
The number of young Chinese workers aged 15-24 years of age will likely fall by a third in the next 12 years, giving more bargaining power to this younger blue-collar generation, Beijing-based consultancy Dragonomics has projected.
Advocates decry Foxconn treatment of student interns
The average monthly wage of China's migrant workers in 2011 rose 21.2 percent from 2010 to 2,049 yuan ($320), with wages higher in the more developed coastal areas like Guangdong. Even so, despite the recent increases, such wages are still many times lower than in Western developed economies.
On a recent afternoon outside a labor market in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan, a scattering of people were scrutinizing recruitment placards on a fence. Companies were looking for store managers, retail assistants and accountants. Some were offering salaries that range from 1,200 to 6,000 yuan.
'All menial work'
Xie Wen, 22, an unemployed former nurse, looked horrified when asked whether she was considering a job at a factory.
"It sounds good, but it's all menial work. If you want to earn a lot, you have to work a lot of overtime," she said, adding that she does not want her next job "to be too tough. I don't want any night shifts and I don't do overtime."
Her friend, Jin Jin, 27, who has been looking for work since she quit her job at a pharmacy a month ago, said she resigned because it was "meaningless" work. Since 2004, she has held four to five jobs and is now seeking one in sales that pays about 2,000 yuan, with about 4-6 days off a month, subsidized meals and overtime fees.
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Clad in a black blazer, jeans and pink sequined shoes, Dou Jing, 20, said she worked in the quality control department in an electronics factory for a year after high school.
"It was very tiring. I had to work night shifts that lasted 12 hours," Dou said. She later found a job as a receptionist for a small company, greeting guests and pouring tea for them.
"I didn't feel I could learn anything," she said, adding she wanted to learn some skills in her next job and open a shop.
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Walking through the crowd, a man surnamed Yang was trying to recruit telemarketers. He was distributing flyers that offered wages of 3,000 to 5,000 yuan a month, but not many people expressed interest.
"Workers are more choosy, they want a high salary, a job that's close to home and work that has very little responsibility," he said. "I think that's unrealistic."
Although the younger, more finicky cohort of migrant workers could pose a challenge for China's exporters, Innes-Ker said "we're still a long way away from the idea that foreign companies are moving out of China because it's too expensive."
"It's very difficult to find somewhere with the similar strengths of China," he said. "When it comes down to it, China has massive clusters that allow a very high degree of specialization to occur, and that helps to push down costs quite dramatically."
'Eat bitterness'
Zhang's elder brother, Zhang Junfeng, 30, who also works at Foxconn, said turnover is particularly rampant among younger factory workers, particularly those born in the 1990s.
"They'll resign the minute they get angry," Junfeng said. "Very few of them can eat bitterness."
Reuters
Zhang Junfeng (left), picks vegetables with his relatives at their home in Zhengzhou, Henan province Wednesday.
Eating bitterness is an expression used by Chinese who have endured decades of natural and man-made hardships throughout China's tumultuous history -- a term that also applies to Zhang's parents, who are both 61 and were farmers their whole lives.
On a recent afternoon, the pair sat in the courtyard of their home in Yezhang village, an hour's drive from Zhengzhou along several unpaved roads that cut through fields of wheat. They were picking through freshly harvested spinach from their fields to sell in Zhengzhou.
Zhang laughed when asked how her life is different from her parents, whose faces are brown and wrinkled from the sun. "At that time how can there be factories? That time, there were communes," she said.
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The round-faced Zhang, clad in a red tunic and black sweatpants, knows a thing or two about eating bitterness.
She was 18 when her mother paid a middleman 600 yuan to find her a factory job in Dongguan, a gritty city in Guangdong. When she arrived after a two-day rickety bus ride in 2004, she called home and cried to her mother after only a few days.
Unreasonable quotas?
In a Foxconn factory in Longhua in a suburb of Shenzhen, Zhang said she was hospitalized for two weeks in late 2011, blaming her supervisor for setting unreasonable quotas. She finally protested with her feet, quitting after about three months.
In one day, Zhang is required to paste 5,000 round dots by hand on a component for motherboards.
Yet even with the tedious work, Zhang says conditions at the Zhengzhou factory are better than at the previous Foxconn factories where she's worked. Her workday is about eight hours and she is given eight days off a month.
Foxconn pays her a base salary of 1,550 yuan a month, an increase from 1,320 yuan the year before, and extra for overtime duty. She lives four to a room in her dormitory, which she pays 150 yuan a month to rent and is Spartan with just two metal bunk beds and a desk.
Back at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen where Zhang worked in 2010, workers on the assembly line were banned from talking to one another and taking toilet breaks that exceed 10 minutes, according to Zhang.
"At that time, that made me think of the phrase: 'We're humans, we're not machines'," she said.
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Leave a Comment:
Terry Gou is nothing but a protege of Steve Jobs. Jobs worked his people like slaves. There will be more about Apple surfacing. Jobs had you zombies hoodwinked.
I do my part buy not using any Apple products and Good riddance to Steve Jobs. I was foolish to pay $300 for a ipod and glad to sell it for half that. Apple is a disgusting company and always has been from day one.
Chinese worker,we're human, we're not robots! Ah yeah actually you are.Along with robot,throw slave into the mix.As long as people let people like these inconsiderate inhumane bastards run the world and push them are around,then yes you are!
It's called Greed and Money folks,the Route of all Evil. It makes bastards out of people towards their fellow human beings.They really really don't care, just as long as these bastards get what they want!
dear all idiots who post messages here: there is no morality or ethics in business. wake up you morons.
is that a fact? do you subscribe to it? do you do it? would you do it? have you been a victim of it? are you disappointed about it? can you change it? would you change it? should you change it for yourself and those around you? if you are young it's not too late to make these choices and make a difference on your life. well, it's never too late anyhow.
There is generally an understanding in business these days that if you don't act unethically your competition will and you'll go out of business. Thus, it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy as every business acts unethically to stay ahead of the competition who is also acting unethically.
I beg to differ. There is morals and ethics in business. Many people choose not to abide by them. Ill gotten gains bring no happiness.
Jobs was no inovator...He just ripped off other people ideas. Worth a hundred billion! How come we got to pay so much for your goods Apple and buy it over and over and over again? These are not durable goods..Just planned obsolescent crap.
Good one. yes quite often they harvest others ideas and exploit them, to no or little credit to the original thinker, and to no sharing or little sharing. I've seen it my whole life, no wonder there is such social discontentment. Users, usury, abuse etc...
The biggest problem with this article is how people are interpreting it. A few facts from the article:
The workers CHOOSE to work there, because they WANT to. They are not slaves, if they were slaves they would be forced to work there.
Yes, their wages are low compared to that of the US... but guess what, they don't live in the US...These workers do not need $900 a month to pay rent and another $200 a month for food and they don't need $1000 a month for health insurance, and they don't need $1000 a month for tuition. Health care is free, education is free, food is subsidized by her job... literally the ONLY "major" expense these workers have is rent... which s 120 yen a month.... that's $19 a month. This means essentially they have over 80% of their income left over to put into savings. Can you imagine how much money you'd have to make in the US to be able to put 80% of it into savings???
Please stop comparing Chinese wages to US wages. These people don't live in the US, they live in China and pay Chinese prices to live their lives.
I worked as a cashier for 3 years in high school. We were only allowed 2 10 minute breaks for an 8 hour day (plus a lunch break) and we weren't supposed to talk to other cashiers while working... I would hardly consider that slave labor.
These people flock to these factory jobs because although they have long hours they make a significant amount of money compared to the costs of living.
I agree that safety and working conditions should improve, and I hope they do. But pretending this is some atrocity that they are getting paid so little is just ignorant, they make money based on the cost of living in the area, nothing more.
Sounds like you are fan of those wanting inexpensive, compliant workers.
Some of us are not willing to be inexpensive, compliant workers.
I really hate to disappoint you but there is more to life than working for others and being inexpensive and compliant so as not to impact the riches of the guy at the top.
You are stuck with the mindset that people have to be inexpensive and compliant and work for the wealthy or they have no worth.
This is just not true.
IfITellUWhoIAmUCanWireTapMe,
So what are they supposed to pay these workers? U.S. wages? That would put them so far above everyone else in China that every worker could live in a mansion. If you open a factory in a country, you pay the prevailing wages in that country. That's just how it works.
How about paying a fair wage to an American? or would that mean you would have to quit the exploitation of foreign countries and your CEO could not make millions and millions of unearned dollars playing golf in the afternoon while the real workers get almost nothing to live on and little time to themselves? These CEOs actually get deluded into thinking they are better than everyone else because of what they are unfairly paid. This is social injustice at its pinnacle. They become robber barons.
Every CEO is living in a mansion, why NOT every worker? HE is no better than the other workers and certainly does not work as long and as hard.
In your mind it works like that, in my mind it does not "work" like that.
20 different jobs? What idiot hired her in the first place?
20 corporate bosses desperate for inexpensive compliant workers.
Why is this any surprise? When Europe had lots of un- or under-employed peasants, they ran their factories the same way as China now does theirs. Dickens didn't write complete fiction - the hardship and squalor he portrayed was real. Gustav Dore' didn't make up the scenes of English slums he depicted and, if they looked like illustrations for Dante's "Inferno", well, that was the reality. Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" portrays the same world of worker exploitation and debasement, albeit shifted to France. As another writer noted, the same was true of Japan, in the years following the Meiji restoration and extending till the 1970's.
As long as profit remains the primary motivating factor for businesses, as long as consumers pursue cheaper and cheaper goods, this will be the reality and, as each country exhausts its available masses with wage-slave labor, the manufacturers will find cause to shift to ever more countries, searching for that mass of people ripe for exploitation. Indeed, eventually, the West will sink to the level of abject poverty necessary to attract business and then we will be told that "the jobs are coming back". Not quite, what will be coming back is the 19th Century - and we'll all applaud and call it "progress".
There are antidotes to this cycle, but we are too busy apportioning blame and flinging recriminations at each other to adopt them and Santayana will continue to laugh at us from the grave.
And thanks Apple for driving music stores out of business! What about their lost jobs! Glad I still have my Pioneer amp, turntable, reciever and albums. Ever listen to Hendrix on a iPod with its 1/2 watt output? What a shame. You can have your downloads people. Keep feeding Apples profits while you wallow in their muzak.....
While I share your Luddite impulses, once the technological genie escapes the bottle, there's no putting him back and the younger generation is so indoctrinated that they cannot even conceive of any other way of doing business or living life. SO, we can try to smash the machines or we can look for other options and, in any war 'twixt us and the machines, the machines are gonna win (yeah, I, too, can hear Ah-nuld declaiming "Are you Zarah Connor?").
There are some realities which could be exploited - this country is still relatively rich in resources and options, still young and growing, and still has room to grow, but as long as we wallow in and worship the Muzak (another company killed, btw, by the I-Pod), we're gonna remain blind to those options and become increasingly poorer and more embittered.
Don't get me started on that subject - iTunes and its impact on musicians and music. I really just better not get started.
APPLE inc. is a classic case of wanting to have YOUR cake and eat it too. Apple was a stepchild of IBM which was the Master when it came to this practice as was Bell Telephone/ATT&T.
Reality check: it is the CHINESE factory supervisors / owners who set the hours & wages -
and they, as well as the Chinese Government had better be more aware of their personnel / workers - Regardless of how much or how often the Government shuts down the web or social networks - Their Spring is coming - China has experienced revlolutions before, and they will again. I will light a candle for the common citizen who will have their day.
Actually, if you read stuff like "The Economist", then you'd know that China is already rife with both industrial and peasant protests. These people know that they are being screwed over for the sake of the governing elites and their buddies in business. Unfortunately, the American public doesn't know any of that because the American media thinks that the latest Kardashian outrage is more important or, at least, of greater interest to the boobs of America (and, frankly, the media is probably right about that one...).
I was brought up to believe America stood for something. I believed we always tried to take the moral high ground by refusing to deal with countries that had no to very few labor laws. We would never think of purchasing anything from a communist country. We would never support cheep child labor. But all of that changed with these Free Trade Agreements that big corporations wanted. Today we do everything we always said we never would as a country. Today our unemployment is near all time highs, but we still give corporations tax breaks to ship our jobs overseas, like it's a good thing. We're traveling down a very slippery slope and picking up speed. We are losing, if we haven't already lost, our sense of self. It is hard seeing where we have gone in a very few years. It appears we no longer know what is right from what is wrong.
We do not have a Free Trade Agreement with China or most other similar countries. Apple never shipped these jobs to China as these devices were never assembled here. We have only 4.5% of the world's population. The U.S. has very slow population growth and will likely see only modest economic growth for the foreseable future. Major corporations want to be able to sell their products and services to the other 95.5%, especially in countries that are seeing significant growth in their economies.
Thank you Chinese workers for your hard work and sacrifice that we in the west able to buy things that our wallet can afford.
I hope you're being sarcastic. If so many of the good paying jobs that we used to have were not all in China and other 'third world' countries, we in the west would be able to afford products made in our own countries.
Just stating what the wages are in other countries does not give a realistic picture. One must factor in the cost of living as well. I can remember when a man earning $10,000 a year in the U.S.A. was supporting his family and living comfortably. There was a time in my life when I earned $4940 a year gross for a 40 hour week, $75 a week take home: After paying rent for my studio apt., utilities, food, gas, insurance and clothes, I had $100 per mo. to save and $50 per month to spend on entertainment. Today I must work 48 hours per week just to make ends meet, no savings, no entertainment. If the Chinese only have $15 per month in living expenses, they're doing better than I am. It's all relative.
Fix the problem!
Don't buy apples's products;
Modern day slavery!
The CEO @ Apple is paid 1- B $$$/year.
Steve Jobs took a salary of $1 per year. Their new CEO has a base salary of $900,000 per year. He has been awarded stock options that begin to vest in 5 years and could be worth many millions depending on how the company's stock performs. He is paid nowhere near $1 billion.
@peter17; my source was CNN; wkatever; who is worth $900,000.00/yr? I'm engineer and has developed many products and hold many inventions and I never earned $900,000.00 in 56 years; ( life time earning) what can the CEO bring to the table, more than I?
America leads all nations and the world, when it comes to Slavery; Check your founding Father's they were all slave owners; botton feeders; the lowest of the low! So why complain about what America is good @;Slavery!
I live in Mainland China. I have lived here for more than six years, and have lived in Taiwan and Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia for most of the past 25 years. The factories in the SEZ (Special Economic Zone) in Guangdong are having a hard time keeping workers. I have been to many factories here in China. I often see slow and inefficient work processes. When I was a young man back in Greenville, South Carolina I worked as a warp doffer. I have seen the exact same looms here in China and workers doing exactly the same job that I did when I was young. The workers here in China doing the exact same job were working at a snail’s pace. When I did the job back in South Carolina, I worked very fast. One factory worker from the USA in my days could outwork 20 factory workers doing the same job today in China. I was at least 20 times faster than what I have seen at the factories here in China, and that is being generous to the Chinese. Factory laborer salaries in the SEZ are higher than good executive job salaries in the major cities, but the workers often complain and do not want long term employment. They typically only work a few months before quitting. Factory workers in the SEZ seem to be getting spoiled and lazy in my view.
Like going to McDonalds and you don't get your fries or napkins. How do you think people would feel working for so little money? Let the Repulicans in and we will all soon find out.
This story is typical propaganda trying to besmirch the name of APPLE!
Welcome to Capitalism.
How about the truth and Foxconn AND EVERY IT MANUFACTURER IN THE WORLD. Enough of the Apple this and Apple that BS. They are at least making it transparent while every other player wants it hidden and quite and private and keep the status quo for slave labour. That's you Androids.
2md point, I worked in the IT for a Chinese manufacturer and I can tell you Foxconn employees make REAL GOOD salaries and safe work conditions. The Chinese manufacturers - not the Western licensed manufacturers - actually do work in sweatshop slave labour conditions.
If we want to really help, we can help by cleaning up the Mexican cartels. They've done more mass killings and human rights abuses than what's going on in Syria. Leave Syria, let the Arabs take care of it, they want to take the lead role in the issue there, let them. We have our own backyard in Mexico to take care of. And why? We can pull the manufacturing away from China and into Mexico, people will become prosperous and not resort to the Cartels for money, manufacturing is closer to home and faster to change and still maintain the same manufacturing costs as in China.
Jazzism, that has already been tried, the factories over in Mexico which turned out everything from micro-chips to mother boards was manufactured down there. The factories in Spanish were called: Maqueladoras. But the pay was so bad that the turnover rate was unbearable and did little to stop the illegal immigration to the U.S. The Mexican workers demanded higher pay so the ceo's of the company's moved many of their factories to China for even cheaper labor.
That's what life in America will be like when they get rid of the unions. No one to turn to when you're paid $2 an hour and made to work overtime for 10 cents extra an hour. Laugh if you will, it can happen, the repukeicans are already licking their chops at getting rid of all collective bargaining so they can make the wealthier even welthier and make you, the sap for falling for their lies about how unions are breaking America, even poorer.
What an astounding contrast between those who make the product and those that use it.
What is the responsibility of the PRC government in all of these ? None ? Labor welfare is none of PRC government's business ? Pollution is none of PRC government business ? Minimum wage and maximum working hours not PRC government business ? Mandatory rest period not PRC government business ? Minimum holidays per year ? Maximum days between days off ? Health conditions in work place (air, light, area per worker, noise, etc.) ? PRC is too backward to know of any of these ? All of these are western inventions and therefore not suitable for China ? China has been finding its own solutions in the last 60 years and this is the result ?
Questions, question.... Since we don't suppose to tell China what to do, all we can do is ask questions.
I find it difficult to feel sorry for these workers. I mean, the US economy is in shambles and yet we are still outsourcing our jobs. Does anyone see the hypocricy in that?