higurashihougi Tue Feb 07, 2023 9:35 am
Not in the West, but made by the element of the capitalist world distinctive of the West.
https://restofworld.org/2023/foxconn-iphone-factory-china/
‘iPhones are made in hell’
[...]
Inside the workshop, Hunter said he felt a kind of oppression he had never experienced in his previous Foxconn jobs, which were away from the factory floor. With no windows, he said that it was impossible to tell day from night without checking a clock. Managers required such a high tempo that he felt he could not stop for a second. Hunter even witnessed one colleague getting his pay reduced for spending too long drinking water. The constant scolding was humiliating, he said, even though he was rarely the target. Colleagues broke into tears under the stress.
Hunter recalled hearing one line leader shouting and swearing after a colleague went to the toilet and another supervisor yelling at a worker who had completed their task only 40 times in one hour, while others had managed 60. Occasionally, a worker, usually someone new, decided they had had enough and yelled back. Such rebellion never ended well. Disobedient workers, Hunter said, would be fired on the spot or banned from working overtime so they would have little reason to stay.
One 30-year-old worker, Wang, who requested to be identified only by his surname to avoid being identified by his employers, recently spent a month at the Foxconn factory while on a winter break from his regular work on container ships. He told Rest of World that one day, after he spent part of his lunch break smoking a cigarette, supervisors penalized him for not returning to his station as fast as possible, banning him from lucrative overtime work for three days. “They yell at me more than my parents,” Wang said. “I was having mental breakdowns all the time.”
[...]
Jenny Chan, a sociologist with Hong Kong Polytechnic University who has been studying labor issues at Foxconn since 2010, said that the conditions at the company are far from the worst in China but that they nevertheless show the precarious lives of manufacturing workers. They get hired or fired following the ups and downs of global electronics markets and are left with few skills or career prospects. “Foxconn never aims at having a stable workforce with roots, social relations, solidarity, or bargaining power. It’s always change, change, and change,” Chan told Rest of World. “These workers will not have a promotion path or really share the prosperity in China.”