High Tech Misery in China

February 18 2009

High Tech Misery in China: The Dehumanization of Young Workers Producing Our Computer Keyboards

"We feel like we are serving prison sentences.” -Meitai factory worker

“The factory is forever pressing down on our heads, and will not tolerate even the tiniest mistake. When working, we work continuously. When we eat, we have to eat with lightning speed. When I need to go to the bathroom, I have to try my hardest to control myself, to hold it in and not go. The security guards are like policemen watching over prisoners. We’re really livestock and shouldn’t be called workers.”

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
❏ Two thousand workers, mostly young women, produce computer equipment including keyboards and printer cases for Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM.

❏ Management instructs the workers to “love the company like your home,” “continuously strive for perfection” and to spy on and “actively monitor each other.”

❏ Workers are prohibited from talking, listening to music, raising their heads, putting their hands in their pockets. Workers are fined for being one minute late, for not trimming their fingernails—which could impede the work, and for stepping on the grass. Workers are searched on the way in and out of the factory. Workers who hand out flyers or discuss factory conditions with outsiders are fired.

❏ The young workers sit on hard wooden stools twelve hours a day, seven days a week as 500 computer keyboards an hour move down the assembly line or one every 7.2 seconds. Workers are allowed just 1.1 seconds to snap each key into place, repeating the same operation 3,250 times an hour, 35,750 times a day, 250,250 times a week and over one million times a month.

❏ The workers are paid 1/50th of a cent for each operation.

❏ The assembly line never stops, and workers needing to use the bathroom must learn to hold it until there is a break.

❏ All overtime is mandatory, with 12-hour shifts seven days a week and an average of two days off a month. A worker daring to take a Sunday off—which is supposedly their weekly holiday—will be docked 2 ½ days’ wages. Including unpaid overtime, workers are at the factory up to 87 hours a week. On average, they are at the factory 81 hours a week, while toiling 74 hours, including 34 hours of overtime, which exceeds China’s legal limit by 318 percent!

❏ The workers are paid a base wage of 64 cents an hour, which does not even come close to meeting subsistence level needs. After deductions for primitive room and board, the workers’ take-home wage drops to just 41 cents an hour. A worker toiling 75 hours a week will earn a take-home wage of $57.19, or 76 cents an hour including overtime and bonuses. The workers are routinely cheated of 14 to 19 percent of the wages legally due them.

❏ Ten to twelve workers share each crowded dorm room, sleeping on narrow metal bunk beds that line the walls. They drape old sheets over their cubicle openings for privacy. In the winter, workers have to walk down several flights of stairs to fetch hot water in a small plastic bucket, which they carry back to their rooms to take a sponge bath. In the summer, dorm temperatures reach into the high 90s.

❏ Workers are locked in the factory compound four days a week and are prohibited from even taking a walk.

❏ To symbolize their “improving lives” the workers are served a special treat on Fridays—a small chicken leg and foot. For breakfast, they are given watery rice gruel. The workers say the food has a bad taste and is “hard to swallow.”

❏ Illegally, workers are not inscribed in the mandatory work injury and health insurance and Social Security maternity leave program. In the Molding department, due to the excessive heat, the workers suffer skin rashes on their faces and arms.

❏ One worker summed up the general feeling in the factory: “I feel like I am serving a prison sentence.”

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Meitai Plastics & Electronics Factory, Dongguan City, Guangdong, CHINA
Hewlett Packard, Lenovo, Microsoft, Dell IBM

Research: Charles Kernaghan, Jonathann Giammarco, Barbara Briggs
February 2009

National Labor Committee
nlc@nlcnet.org
www.nlcnet.org

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PDF format, 1.4MB, 63Pages.

“We are not human…”

“Working like this every day I don’t see how we are any different from machines. Management treats us so harshly; it is like we are not human. They don’t see us as people. They treat us like tools. The factory has to pay money to purchase the machines, but they don’t have to spend money on us.”

“We have to beg the boss for mercy…”

“The factory rules are really like a private law. We are forced to obey and endure management’s harsh treatment. Some young workers have boyfriends and girlfriends outside the factory and if they want to go on a date, we have to beg the boss for mercy to be able to leave the factory compound.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The New Assembly Line 3
Dongguan Meitai Plastics & Electronics Factory 9
Brain Washing 12
All Employees should regard the factory as Home—but… 13
Big Brother is Watching 14
Export Subsidies in China Helped Duty-free Entry to the U.S. 16
Hours—Excessive Forced Overtime 18
Lenovo and The Olympics 24
Wages: Workers Cheated of Up to 19 Percent 26
Company Dorms…Primitive Conditions 36
Illegally—Workers Not Inscribed in National Social Security Health Insurance 51
Health & Safety Violations 53