After arash of employee suicidesbrought scrutiny to the work condition in Foxconn ’s manufacturing plant , somehorror storiesquickly came to lightness . Now , the Times hasfollowed a workerthrough his average dark - shift , forgather some 1,600 heavy drives .
12th Foxconn Employee Jumps ; Becomes 10th To Die
His opinion ? It ’s arduous employment , but it ’s work nonetheless .
24 yr old Yuan Yandong says that body of work at Foxconn , where employees ’ movements are strictly timed and optimize for efficiency , can make one “ dead , ” but he says he ’s mostly get used to it . During his shift , which lasts from 7:30pm to sometime after 5:30am , depending on extra time , he is one station in a huge hard drive assembly line :
His job is to help fill out 1,600 hard drives – his workshop ’s casual quota – and to verify every one is perfect . Seated in the centre of the assembly line in his calamitous Foxconn sports shirt , cotton slacks and company - mandate white-hot charge card slider , he wait for the conveyor belt to pitch a partly assembled rectangular difficult drive to his place . He identify two shaping fries inside the crusade ’s casing , inserts a gimmick that redirects light in the parkway and then fastens four fuck with an electrical screwdriver before sending the drive down the line . He has exactly one minute to complete the multistep chore .
Yeah , that sounds pretty miserable , but it ’s not necessarily thehell factorythat some reports have described . award , the Times stipulates that Yandong talked to the paper “ with the approving of his supervisory program , ” and presumably the Foxconn experience varies greatly from factory to mill , worker to worker .
Still , disturbingly , Yandong was n’t aware that he was only legally allowed to do work a maximum of 36 hours extra time a month , and aver that he often worked double that , especially when big orders came in to his factory .
Thefull accounthas plenty more details — workers are n’t allowed to heed to MP3 players , but get a one 60 minutes tiffin break mid - shift , etc — and is certainly deserving a read , but ultimately it ’s just another keyhole glimpse into a largely undocumented Foxconn factory polish . report like this one help occupy out our scene of what it ’s really like to exploit in China ’s electronics factories , but what remains to be translate is if most employees have aline to the work or have indeed been numbed by its demands . [ NYT ]
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