Eerie, deserted dorms where Apple iPhone workers lived eight to a room, showered in groups of 20

dailymail. ^ | 11 May 2016 | George Knowles

[dennisw]

Sprawling dormitory complex outside Shanghai housed workers who spend 12 hours a day making Apple products Eerie images show austere eight and 12-bed rooms and filthy 'bathrooms' where workers used communal showers Workers operated water taps by pedalling and squatting toilet cubicles positioned over open sewerage drains

Dorms can house 6,000 workers at a time but were abandoned hurriedly, with mementos left behind Impoverished men and women from countryside work 12-hour shifts for £250 a month and pay £16 to live in dorms

Mold and mildew crawl up the walls of the communal bathrooms and the tiny, austere rooms are crammed full of bare bunkbeds.

The grim dormitory complex

Four blocks, which housed migrant workers employed by Apple contractor Pegatron until they were hurriedly abandoned eight weeks ago.

Six thousand employees lived in the dormitories at the peak of iPhone 6 production but many of the roughly 1,000 left were told not to come back while others were transferred to dorms in the main factory complex.

A rare and fascinating insight into the austere living conditions for staff at Taiwanese electronics giant Pegatron who work exhausting 12-hour shifts and are reckoned to make up to one half of the world's iPhone 6s.

Apple and Pegatron recently allowed cameras into the iPhone factory in Shanghai in response to years of accusations that their staff were having to work gruelling hours on low pay. Paid basic salaries of just under £250 a month for gruelling six-day weeks which they can increase by about £200 by working daily overtime.

MailOnline visited the huge Kangqiao Road East dormitories on the outskirts of Shanghai where Pegatron workers lived, and which were in use until February. Four blocks, named Huei Yang, have been mothballed while a separate dormitory is still in use.

[clee1]

I was in those same barracks, I believe....

[kanawa]

One time they were lazy and I didn’t give them the one on the way home.

So, did they learn their lesson?

[21twelve]

Yes they did! And they had been good workers up until that afternoon as well. Not sure what happened that day. They liked working with us. We were off the mine site proper so they got double pay. And we would be gone for over ten hours most days, so that meant another 50 cents an hour for all their hours. So instead of making $4 a day they were making around $18 for a 12-hour day. Plus $4 worth of candy bars a day.

[Rad_J]

I have been in China recently. When Apple is releasing a new iphone version, thousands of workers from the area leave their jobs for a month or so to build iPhones and then go back to their jobs. The other factories slow down quite a bit and then things go back to normal when the workers return.