via: china herald
The book, though frequently academic in tone and perspective, nevertheless gives a vivid idea of life in the factory. There are details of the cumulative lack of sufficient sleep (all the workers spend the first half of their one day off a week sleeping), company pay stoppages for infringements of the rules, issues between workforce and management over such things as the radio, attempts by workers to slow down the production line due to exhaustion, and so on. The monotony of the work is so extreme that even reading about it induced in me a sense of fatigue and disgust.
the boss of the toy factory told me that conditions are even worse in Guangdong factories than in those factories of Yangtze delta (including shanghai, jiangsu and zhejiang). i am surprised to find that under the roof of the new factory buildings, there are not many "machines" as i expected, the large rooms are occupied by rows of hundreds of workers, all females, cutting, sewing, binding, ironing, etc., without talking to each other, these workers, most of them in their early 20s and from nearby "agriculture" provinces like Anhui and Jiangsu, are like "machines" themselves.
factory provides dormitories and a dining hall, simple but clean, besides these basic stuff, there are no other facilities like a library or a place for social contact. i don't have time to talk with workers, but from their faces i can't find anything that shows they are satisfied.
it's a saturday afternoon. workers will get extra pay according to how many toy bears, toy monkey, toy frogs, toy dogs .. they produce. the boss complained they can not find enough workers since more and more migrant workers are attracted by cleaner jobs with nicer pays, and at last, the boss told me:
we like japanese more than americans!
"why?" i asked. he explained that americans won't order tens of thousands of toy bears, monkeies, frogs, dogs .. from him if his factory doesn't have good facilities and safety measures for his workers. he repeated:
japanese businessman are better!
china