Posted on 05/11/2016 11:06:45 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
“And Trump says he will force Apple to make the iPhone in the US. Trump really doesn’t get it”.
Yeah, its better to use overseas slave labor camps so we can save $20 Bucks on a phone, and some greedy Billionaire can add to his fortune.
Much as I love to bash Apple, I have to say this is sensationalism. For example:
“Workers operated water taps by pedalling and squatting toilet cubicles positioned over open sewerage drains...”
This is par for the course in China. They don’t use toilets, they squat. They don’t have electric pumps on all their water lines, so you may need to pump manually to get it going. Basically, they have industrialization in the private sector, but when it comes to the public or domestic sectors they are somewhere in between a medieval agrarian nation and a modern one.
We make being a Government Apparatchik far too comfortable.
“Yeah, its better to use overseas slave labor camps so we can save $20 Bucks on a phone, and some greedy Billionaire can add to his fortune.”
As opposed to the alternative, which is to give welfare to factory workers and bill it all back to the rest of the taxpayers and consumers? There is no difference between that and them just signing up for welfare as it is, except that the factory workers feel better about themselves while the rest of us take it in the rear again.
Me too. Grew up in a 1 bedroom house. Me, my mom, brother, and grandparents. We lived outside mostly.
Too bad they separated the boys from the girls. At least when I lived in cockroach infested $80/month squalor in college over “Viva Zapata’s” I had hope....
Change the title to Microsoft products and you’ll hear a different tune being sung here.
Frankly, it sounds like more fun to hang them by their scrotums.
I agree, except for the lack of Western toilets it looks a great deal like my dorm room from the mid eighties.
These workers where making about $650 a month and only paying about $23 a month for room and board.
So in all reality in a country like China where the average monthly wage is less than $400 a month they where making a killing and getting to keep a vast majority of their pay.
If it was not paying high enough wages, why where there so many people willing to work for such low pay?
Most of the additional pay would come from Apple, not consumers: Apple's margins are around 40%.
They also received an average of 200 #’s a month in Over time.
Imagine the conditions if there were no iphones. I shudder at the thought.
“As opposed to the alternative, which is to give welfare to factory workers and bill it all back to the rest of the taxpayers and consumers?”
No, you pay people, you know like Henry Ford did, a decent wage...
LOL.
This is China, not Apple. If you have ever seen older pictures of Chinese cities, the roads are filled with pedestrians and bicycles, not cars. How did people get around in huge cities? Well for the most part the cities were built to accomodate this. Every large employer had a dormatory built right next to it. Then right next to that, a 7-11 sized grocery store, and other small shops. People could get their basic needs within a short walk.
We need dorm mothers too... I’m thinking random voters selected from their congressional districts and paid a stipend to go supervise these goons and make sure they’re not boozin’ and whorin’ it up :)
Exactly. For the average worker in this place, they don't face income tax. These people (all young) basically don't have lots of skills or experience, and they also don't expect this to be a long-term career. They do it for a few years, and go back home with enough money to buy a decent apartment, start a family or start a small business. Unlike in the USA, they aren't allowed to be a burden on society or their parents.
Its called climbing the economic ladder.
More like $4,000. Don't get me wrong - those conditions in the pictures are not bad and I would bet much better than they had in rural China. My point is the infrastructure in place to build the iPhone would take years and billions to replicate. All that Trump is proposing with his tariffs is to increase the cost of goods.
We need a president who will reduce regulations and taxes to make US manufacturing more competitive.
I don’t feel so bad about my old dorm at Michigan Tech now, for some reason...
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