Posted on 04/20/2010 8:45:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Showing Chinese sweatshop workers slumped over their desks with exhaustion, it is an image that Microsoft won't want the world to see.
Employed for gruelling 15-hour shifts, in appalling conditions and 86f heat, many fall asleep on their stations during their meagre ten-minute breaks. For as little as 34p an hour, the men and women work six or seven days a week, making computer mice and web cams for the American multinational computer company.
This photo and others like it were smuggled out of the KYE Systems factory at Dongguan, China, as part of a three-year investigation by the National Labour Committee, a human rights organisation which campaigns for workers across the globe.
The mostly female workers, aged 18 to 25, work from 7.45am to 10.55pm, sometimes with 1,000 workers crammed into one 105ft by 105ft room. They are not allowed to talk or listen to music, are forced to eat substandard meals from the factory cafeterias, have no bathroom breaks during their shifts and must clean the toilets as discipline, according to the NLC.
The workers also sleep on site, in factory dormitories, with 14 workers to a room. They must buy their own mattresses and bedding, or else sleep on 28in-wide plywood boards. They 'shower' with a sponge and a bucket.
And many of the workers, because they are young women, are regularly sexually harassed, the NLC claimed.
The organisation said that one worker was even fined for losing his finger while operating a hole punch press.
Microsoft is not the only company to outsource manufacturing to KYE, but it accounts for about 30 per cent of the factory's work, the NLC said. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Foxconn, Acer, Logitech and Asus also use KYE Systems.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Nappy time
Its the msg get ya every time
MSFT is a big Obama supporter and so is Apple.
.
They ‘shower’ with a sponge and a bucket.....
This is ridiculous and stinky....
Since so many of the workers are napping, how do we know that it isn’t something they just do at break time. I mean look at any break room in the USA and someone is always asleep during breaks.
MSFT is a big Obama supporter and so is Apple.
Pathetic!
Is MS demanding that this factory treat its workers this way? If not, then aren't I just as guilty as MS? After all, I benefit (to SOME degree) from this. So do millions of other end-users. Are they all guilty?
I believe in the guilt of the perpetrator, not including everyone downstream from the perpetrator.
If you buy this crap, then you must also accept the whole "white guilt" argument, since white Americans have arguably benefitted to SOME degree from black slavery.
Say NO to the false doctrine of inherited guilt!
And MS is "THE" MS in MSNBC.
But unions and liberals saved us from sweat shops.
Does Microsoft have an obligation to TELL their Chinese business partner to treat their workers decently ? Or is this under the auspices of Chinese law ?
Those girls are tired because of all the lonely Chinese guys chasing them with the women shortage and all.
"Dock that c--nk a day's pay for napping on the job."
ROFL.......
Mouse-schwitz....
They are on break. Read the article.
I dunno. Do you tell the owners of the stores where you buy stuff that they must treat their workers the way you say?
(Rant: Not necessarily directed at you)
Microsoft is a customer to the Chinese. If they don't like the way the workers are treated in China, they don't have to use that supplier. If an end user doesn't like it, they don't have to buy the products.
But it's naive and simplistic to presume that workers in a 2nd-World country should be instantly treated as though they were modern-day, union-represented Americans. If they were living the same lifestyle as Americans and working in the same conditions, then there would be no cost benefit to manufacturing there, and they would have no job at all!
So, is it evil to employ them in the conditions they're already used to, at what are considered decent wages there? ...or to not employ them at all?
Then again, I'm sure those workers were just being lazy after running away from men all shift /s
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