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After the people Apple hired to clear its name wrote up a gloomy report of Foxconn working conditions, the manufacturer vowed to reform. First up: shorter, legal working days. But now these overworked workers want to keep overworking. What?
Foxconn says it’s going to bring its employees under the dictates of Chinese law, which max out at 60 hours per week (still a lot!) and 36 hours of monthly overtime:
Foxconn’s concessions, including cutting overtime for its 1.2 million mainland Chinese workers while promising compensation that protects them against losing income, were backed by Apple.
So workers will be spared some of the spirit-killing iPad drudgery, and Foxconn will obey its country’s labour law. But according to Reuters these same workers are fine with being exploited:
Many workers seemed unconvinced that their pay wouldn’t be cut along with their hours. For some Chinese factory workers – who make much of their income from long hours of overtime – the idea of less work for the same pay could take getting used to.
“We are worried we will have less money to spend. Of course, if we work less overtime, it would mean less money,” said Wu, a 23-year-old employee from Hunan province in south China.
A couple possibilities:
- These quotes are either the product of Foxconn fabrication or worker coercion in an attempt at self-defense.
- These workers are so underpaid that the only way they actually can get by is through grueling, illegal overtime.
- The labourers, 99 percent of which are migrants from brutally poor Chinese villages, would rather spend every waking moment blowing dust off of iPad screens than go back to what they were doing before—the old bad is better than awful rationale.
These aren’t mutually exclusive, but all three point to one thing: the state of the Chinese industrial worker is a piss poor one. [Reuters via TUAW]
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The law states workers should work for around 49 hours a week, with this made of 40 normal hours a week with the 36 hours overtime allowed over the course of a month. Still fairly high in comparison to many developed nations, a good 10 hours extra, but China’s still growing and developing so it needs this kind of workforce. You wouldn’t have heard the working populations of late 1800 Britain and the US calling for less hours on their time sheet. People have a paranoia about working less and the impact it will have on their payslip and/or security of their job, even when told otherwise.
I have few mates in Sri Lanka who works 16hrs a day. Every day. We can blame the large factories, inhuman working conditions and crap pay but these guys actually want to work because there are no other ways for them to make money. if these factories didn’t exist or they only let them work for 8 hours, that isn’t enough to provide for a family.
Its always easier for us for us to point the finger at the corporations and tell them to sort it out, but end of the day these peeps rather have a meal, end of the day then going to sleep hungry. Its not simple as some might think.