MORE FACTOIDS:
A Chinese working “hour” is 60 minutes—unlike an American “hour,” which generally includes breaks for Facebook, the bathroom, a phone call, and some conversation. The official work day in China is 8 hours long, but the standard shift is 12 hours. Generally, these shifts extend to 14-16 hours, especially when there’s a hot new gadget to build.
Assembly lines can only move as fast as their slowest worker, so all the workers are watched (with cameras). Most people stand.
The workers stay in dormitories. In a 12-by-12 cement cube of a room, Daisey counts 15 beds, stacked like drawers up to the ceiling. Normal-sized Americans would not fit in them.
Unions are illegal in China. Anyone found trying to unionize is sent to prison.
Some workers can no longer work because their hands have been destroyed by doing the same thing hundreds of thousands of times over many years (mega-carpal-tunnel). This could have been avoided if the workers had merely shifted jobs. Once the workers’ hands no longer work, obviously, they’re canned.
One former worker had asked her company to pay her overtime, and when her company refused, she went to the labor board. The labor board put her on a black list that was circulated to every company in the area. The workers on the black list are branded “troublemakers” and companies won’t hire them.
So these kids are working 6 or 7 days a week for what looks looks to us to be meager wages. Is that bad? Sounds bad. But consider the alternative: starvation or something close to that. At the minimum it would be back to the farms and back to scratching out a living trying to grow your own food.
Clearly, that is not what they want to do or they would simply quit their jobs and do so.
Read a little history. It was not that long ago in this country when children had to work to survive. We don’t do that anymore. We worked ourselves out of it and so will the Chinese. Give them some time and they will move from the 19th to the 20th century. And maybe, in time, to the 21st.