“You might expect an NYU student to seek out a summer internship doing something more interesting than spending 12 hours a day inserting a single screw into an endless production line of iPhones, but Dejian Zeng did exactly that for his summer project,” Ben Lovejoy reports for 9to5Mac.
“He wanted to find out what life was like for workers in an iPhone factory, so spent six weeks as a Pegatron worker in a facility on the outskirts of Shanghai,” Lovejoy reports. “He reported back on everything from the sleeping patterns to the need to download apps to qualify for free Wi-Fi access in the dorms.”
“When it comes to time off, workers have access to Wi-Fi in the dorms where they live eight to a room, but need to either pay for it or download apps to qualify for free access,” Lovejoy reports. “The obvious suspicion here is that the system is being used to inflate download numbers for apps, presumably in return for payment to Pegatron.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It sounds like, overall, Apple is doing an excellent job keeping suppliers in line and making these sort of unskilled assembly line jobs as bearable as possible.
Ha…When Cook and Company sit in their Guilded towers, those workers MUST use overtime to make a smidgen. Typical, slave labor….all so we can have our precious iphones.
…and it’s precisely what globalists like Cook want for the entire working class on this planet..a feudalism nouveau.
Now I’m confused.
The problem is simple to solve: Make all Apple Products in the USA.
There are millions of people in this country who would love those jobs!
Really, botty? Sometimes you still manage to surprise me…
You are now attempting to position Cook as the overlord and suppressor of the working class? The nasty fly in the elite pudding? You have to at least admit that under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple has worked very hard to clean up its supply chain and improve pay and working conditions for the supply chain workers. Apple, in fact, has done far more than any other company of which I am aware.
While the AAPL stock grants provided to Cook after Jobs died were quite excessive (as I have stated multiple times on this forum), I fail to see why you would attempt to position Cook as a “feudal lord nouveau” when there are much more appropriate examples. Deflect much lately?? Or are you just mimicking Flip-Flop Donnie?
Perhaps, botty, you should take ten minutes to discuss the situation with someone. You might discover that it is not as simple as you may have thought.
Melvin, go back to sleep.
I think MDN’s take is generous. Sounds like mandatory 60-hr weeks, a pattern of violations during high-demand times and intimidation to suppress complaints, with Apple doing the bare minimum in terms of letting them police themselves.
Who is “forcing” these people to work here? No one.
They want to work here BECAUSE of the overtime not despite it. The pay is 1.5 times.
People from first world will come and work here for a few weeks and compare it to their first world life like this bozo student trying to be like Daisy.
Ok, lets do another comparison. I came to America from England, where we had overtime pay + 6 weeks of vacation + medical service that you can only dream of in the US. But we had lower pay than in the US. In the US, for the same job, I got higher pay, no overtime pay, vacation of only 2 weeks, and the health system really sucks. Many in the UK would be appalled by the standards here. Now, it is up to me to ‘go with this flow’ or leave. It’s as simple as that.
You’re right Paul. Life in USA is not as good as many think. Medical care, as you mentioned, is a mess. Last time I was in China, I didn’t want to use internet, you knew commies were spying on everyone. When in Rome…
Nobody is forcing them to work there.
But according to the writer, it’s a low-paying job that requires 50% additional hours at overtime rate to even be that.
Because it’s unskilled work, though, it’s a very attractive to some people. And those folks are more susceptible to exploitation (e.g., likely fired if you don’t work the overtime, likely fired if you are too tired / pregnant to work 60-hour week, etc.)
The worker in the article claims that many of these tasks performed by workers could be replaced by robots, but currently it is cheaper to use people rather than use robots — but that will change soon. There were several articles in 2016 detailing how Foxconn is already replacing workers with robots (e.g. in one factory they replaced 60,000 workers with robots) . . . If you read the book “The Second Machine Age” it details how the move to robots will happen at an exponential pace . . . so the big question becomes, “What happens to the millions of Chinese factory workers that get replaced by robots ??” ( look at history, what do large groups of unemployed people do) . . . enjoy 2017 my friends — someday you might look back at these times as “the good old days”.
Is it any different in a Android phone factory???
That does not make much sense to me. Sure, it might inflate app download numbers by 100K or so, but there has to be a more important reason to push the app downloads on the workers. My first guess would be some type of spyware code built into the apps.