Germany had an industrial history somewhat different than the United States or Britain. In the nineteenth century, the Krupp steelworks in Essen was one of the largest factories in the world. But in the first half of the twentieth century, small and midsize firms dominated German industry, often working in collaboration with one another, as the country’s industrial strength lay in the production of diversified, high-quality goods rather than standardized, low-cost products. There were some very large plants making producer goods—most notably steel and chemicals—but consumer-products plants remained smaller. Though Fordism attracted a great deal of attention, in practice German companies were slow to adopt its production techniques and the very large scale factories that came with them due to capital shortages, trade barriers that limited the scale of the market, and a highly skilled labor force that would be underutilized using American methods.57
German auto companies began experimenting with the assembly line in the early 1920s, but only slowly moved toward integrated, mass production. When the National Socialists took power, Adolf Hitler, a great admirer of Ford, pressed the companies to join together to mass produce a German equivalent of the Model T, a “people’s car” or Volkswagen. When they declined, the government itself took charge. In 1938, Hitler laid the cornerstone for a Volkswagen factory at what was originally called Stadt des KdF-Wagens bei Fallersleben or the City of the Strength Through Joy Car at Fallersleban (the nearest village, later to be renamed Wolfsburg). Like the Soviets, the Nazis turned to the United Sates for specialized, single-purpose machinery. But the war intervened before the people’s car could go into mass production; instead, the factory engaged in war production using forced labor, mostly conscripted in Eastern Europe.
German manufacturers gained experience with mass production making armaments during the war. By the early 1950s, conditions in West Germany facilitated its application to civilian production, as domestic spending power and trade increased. The Wolfsburg factory, which survived the war with little damage, converted back to its original purpose. In a throwback to the early days of Ford, for years it produced only one model, the Volkswagen Beetle, later adding a closely related van. The company resisted building plants overseas to keep up volume and make extensive automation profitable. The German model of codetermination, which gave an extensive role to unions in corporate management, and high wages and generous social benefits (including large profit-sharing payments) helped ensure peaceful labor relations. Unlike contemporary American manufacturers, Volkswagen did not fear that workers might take advantage of concentration to disrupt production and force their will on the company.58
Though the Mittelstand of small and medium-sized enterprises continued to dominate the West German and later unified German economy, there were, besides Volkswagen, some manufacturers with very large plants. The chemical giant BASF, once part of IG Farben but reformed as a separate entity after World War II, concentrated production at its long-established complex along the Rhine in Ludwigsafen. In 1963, its managing board acknowledged “that a company whose production volume is concentrated in one geographical spot is especially vulnerable in many respects (e.g. to strikes, earthquakes, and other forces beyond one’s control).” Nonetheless, it decided to continue investing and expanding its historic main plant, while later adding others to increase capacity. In 2016, some 39,000 employees worked at the four-square-mile site, which had some 2,000 buildings.59
But Volkswagen remained the showcase of German industry and Wolfsburg a temple to factory giantism. Like Henry Ford, aware that a factory could be a merchandising tool, Volkswagen’s management built an automobile theme park, Autostadt, next to the main plant, which in 2014 had 2.2 million visitors. Many purchasers arranged to pick up their newly manufactured vehicles there. After German unification, the company built an extraordinary new plant in Dresden to make its highest-priced models. Glass walls make the production process completely visible, with finished cars displayed in a twelve-story glass tower, a Crystal Palace for the twenty-first century.60
If Volkswagen exemplified postwar Western European industrial giantism, dependent on stable labor relations through firm-level and national social democratic policies, the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla el-Kubra, Egypt, in the heart of the Nile delta, demonstrated again the explosive potential when giant factories brought together masses of workers and treated them poorly. Year after year, regime after regime, the Mahalla workers have been at the forefront of the Egyptian labor movement, defending their immediate economic interests and increasingly intervening in national political events as well.
The Misr company was founded in 1927 by Bank Misr, an explicitly nationalist enterprise created to fund Egyptian-owned businesses during an era when Britain still occupied the country and controlled much of its economy. Despite the long history of the Egyptian cotton industry, Misr was the first modern mechanized textile plant to be owned by Muslim Egyptians. At the end of World War II, the integrated mill, which did spinning, weaving, and dyeing, employed twenty-five thousand workers, making it the largest industrial establishment in the Middle East.
Egyptian authorities and company officials projected mechanized textile mills as “citadels of modernity, national progress, and economic development.” But the workforce, largely recruited from the peasantry, did not accept the elite notion of the mill as a shared nationalist project, repeatedly protesting harsh work conditions and low pay. In 1938, the first large strike at the mill demanded higher piece rates and a switch from twelve-hour to eight-hour shifts. A brief strike in 1946 was followed the next year by a massive walkout protesting layoffs and autocratic management. Tanks entered the plant to crush the strike, and three workers were killed in the confrontation. When in 1952 army officers led by Gamal Abdel Nasser seized power, overthrowing the Egyptian monarchy, workers at the mill expected improved conditions, but when they struck, the army once again smashed their walkout.
In a measure of the symbolic and practical importance of Misr, when in 1960 Nasser took a left turn to embrace “Arab Socialism,” the mill was the first industrial enterprise to be nationalized. Under government ownership, the tradition of worker militancy continued, including participation in a three-day strike in 1975 that led to substantial wage increases for industrial workers employed by the state. In 1986, workers struck again, winning a wage hike, and two years later struck yet again, this time explicitly criticizing President Hosni Mubarak. A strike at the mill in late 2006, when the government reneged on promised bonus payments, set off a wave of worker protests at other textile mills and was the prelude to an even bigger strike the following year that won a big boost in the bonuses.
An April 2008 protest by Mahalla workers, broken up by thousands of police, leaving at least three dead, helped spark open opposition to Mubarak, culminating in his tumbling in 2011 during the Arab Spring. In February 2014 workers at the mill struck, demanding the removal of Mubarak-era officials still in company management. Even after yet another quasimilitary regime took power, led by Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the textile workers kept up their militancy, striking in another conflict over bonuses, to protest a government decision to end cotton subsidies, and to call for the ouster of corrupt company officials. As had happened elsewhere, the launching of a giant factory in the name of nationalism and modernity created a workforce with its own views of what that meant, in a strategic position to make their ideas about the past, present, and future matter.61
CHAPTER 7
“FOXCONN CITY”
Giant Factories in China and Vietnam
IN MID-2010, A RASH OF WORKER SUICIDES BROUGHT global attention to a company that three years earlier the Wall Street Journal had dubbed “the biggest exporter you’ve never heard of,” Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., operating under the name Foxconn. That year, eighteen workers between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five attempted suicide at Foxconn factories in China, fourteen successfully, all but one by jumping off a company building. Though startling by themselv
es, what made the suicides a big story around the world was that they occurred at factories that assembled iPads and iPhones, among the hottest consumer goods on the market, symbols of modernity and good living. The juxtaposition of workers feeling so oppressed and alienated by their jobs that they took their lives with the elegantly designed Apple products—seamless, luxurious, futuristic—for a moment raised uncomfortable questions about the sausage factory in which the meat of modernity was being produced, and the human cost of stylish and convenient gadgets.1
The corporate reaction to the suicides proved almost as disturbing as the deaths. The companies that used Foxconn to produce their products, including Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, took a low-key approach, expressing concern and saying that they were investigating. Apple CEO Steve Jobs called the suicides “very troubling,” adding, “We’re all over this.” In 2012, after more bad publicity about Foxconn, Apple contracted with the nonprofit Fair Labor Association to inspect Foxconn plants and their compliance with the monitoring group’s workplace code of conduct. But none of Foxconn’s major clients, including Apple, stopped using its services.
Foxconn founder and chairman Terry Gou at first dismissed the suicides as insignificant, given the size of his workforce. But as the deaths and bad publicity mounted and Foxconn’s share price fell, the company began to act. In June 2010, Foxconn raised basic wages at its Shenzhen plants, where most of the suicides occurred, from the legally mandated minimum of 900 renminbi a month ($132) to 1,200 renminbi ($176) and in October raised wages again. It also set up a twenty-four-hour counseling center for its workers and put on an elaborate celebration at its largest plant, complete with a parade, floats, cheerleaders, Spider-Men, acrobats, fireworks, and chants of “treasure your life” and “care for each other to build a wonderful future.”2
But there was a darker side to the Foxconn reaction, too. The company tried to limit its liability for future deaths by requiring employees to sign disclaimers saying “Should any injury or death arise for which Foxconn cannot be held accountable (including suicides and self-mutilation), I hereby agree to hand over the case to the company’s legal and regulatory procedures. I myself and my family members will not seek extra compensation above that required by the law so that the company’s reputation would not be ruined and its operation remains stable.” Worker outrage soon led it to abandon the effort. The company also began moving production from Shenzhen to new factories in the interior of China, largely to lower wages but also believing that if its migrant workers—the vast majority of its employees—were closer to home they would be less likely to kill themselves. Finally, the company began putting wire mesh around the balconies and outdoor staircases at its dormitories and latches on upper-story windows to keep workers from jumping, while surrounding all its factory and dormitory buildings with netting twenty feet above the ground, so that if a worker did manage to leap they would not die. It used more than three million square meters of yellow netting in the process, almost enough to cover all of New York’s Central Park if a latter-day Christo got really ambitious. Foxconn’s Swiftian response—not to change a production regime that was leading young men and women to jump off buildings, but instead to try to catch them before they hit the ground—seemed a return to the warped utilitarianism of Charles Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, applied to factories so large that they made Manchester’s textile mills look like mom-and-pop shops.3
Although some of the stories about the Foxconn suicides noted the very large size of the factories involved, none mentioned that the company’s Longhua Science and Technology Park in Shenzhen, better known as “Foxconn City,” was, as far as can be determined, the largest factory, in number of employees, in history. Foxconn’s extreme secretiveness makes it impossible to be sure about even such basic information as the numbers of workers at its plants, but journalistic and scholarly accounts have reported that at the time Longhua had more than 300,000 employees, and by some accounts more than 400,000, dwarfing even such monuments to giantism as River Rouge and Magnitogorsk, which combined had far fewer workers than the Foxconn plant. A visiting Apple executive, finding his car stuck in a mass of Longhua employees during a shift change, declared, “The scale is unimaginable.”4
Though no other factory equaled Longhua in its number of workers, there are plenty of other supersized factories in East Asia. Foxconn itself owns many of them. In 2016, the company employed 1.4 million employees in thirty countries, over a million of whom worked in factories in China that ranged in size from eighty thousand to several hundred thousand workers. A second Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, run in close coordination with Longhua, employed 130,000 workers in 2010. One hundred and sixty-five thousand workers produced iPads at a Chengdu factory, a ten-square-kilometer complex several times larger than the Longhua campus. And at peak moments during 2016 an astounding 350,000 workers made iPhones at a Foxconn complex in Zhengzhou, one of the most populous factories in history.5
Other electronics firms also have very large factories in China. In 2011, after the trouble at Foxconn, Apple began shifting some iPad and iPhone production to Pegatron, like Foxconn a Taiwanese-owned firm. In late 2013, Pegatron had more than 100,000 workers at its Shanghai plant, including 80,000 living in overcrowded dormitories.6 Electronics plants with 10,000, 20,000, or even 40,000 workers are not unusual in China. Though small by Foxconn standards, they have more employees than almost any factory in the United States. The 2006 film Manufactured Landscapes, about Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, begins with a tracking shot moving slowly down the aisle of a factory in Xiamen City, Fujian Province, which housed some 20,000 workers making electric coffeepots, irons, and other small appliances. The shot goes on for nearly eight full minutes, giving a sense of the immensity of a factory with even just 20,000 workers.7
A few other industries in Asia besides electronics have very large factories. The Huafang Group, a leading Chinese textile producer, had one factory complex with more than a hundred buildings and 30,000 employees. A few toy factories also are very large.8 And there are some truly gigantic factories making sneakers and casual shoes.
The Foxconn of footwear is Yue Yuen Industrial (Holdings) Limited, a subsidiary of the Taiwanese firm Pou Chen Corporation, founded in 1969. A little more than an hour’s drive north of Foxconn City sits a Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan that in the mid-2000s had 110,000 workers, making it the largest shoe factory in history. Workers produced nearly a million pairs of shoes a month for international brands like Nike (which had offices inside the plant) as well as for Yue Yuen’s own YYSports brand, sold through a chain of company-owned retail stores in China. Like Foxconn City and many other Chinese factories, the plant included dormitories and dining rooms for its workers, as well as a reading room and disco built by Nike. Yue Yuen had five other factories in China, including three more in Guangdong Province. Pou Chen, which in 2015 had revenues of $8.4 billion, controlled shoe factories in Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, the United States, Mexico, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Myanmar as well. In June 2011, more than 90,000 workers went on strike at a Yue Yuen plant in Vietnam, probably the largest single-site strike anywhere in the world in decades.9
Two developments led to the latest chapter of factory giantism. First was the opening up, starting in the 1980s, of China and Vietnam to private and foreign capital, part of national efforts to boost living standards and embrace a modernity increasingly measured by global, largely capitalist, standards. Second was a revolution in retailing in the United States and Western Europe, as in many product lines merchants, rather than manufacturers, became the key players in design, marketing, and logistics. The convergence of these changes resulted in the construction of the biggest factories in history.
Twenty-first-century factory giantism in many ways resembles earlier moments of outsized industrialism, almost eerily so. But in some respects it is quite dissimilar, representing a new form of the factory behemoth. While contemporary Asian factory giants have built on past experience in their organiza
tion, management, labor relations, and technology, they play different economic, political, and cultural roles than earlier giant factories. Like the largest and most advanced factories in the past, today’s industrial giants embody the possibilities and horrors of large-scale industry. But they do so largely out of the spotlight, hidden rather than celebrated as factories once were.
Maoist Giantism
The giant factories built in China and Vietnam over the past two decades came after one of the last substantial efforts to reconceive the factory as a social institution. In the years following the victory of the communist forces in China in 1949, a complicated story of scale and struggle unfolded in the effort to modernize the country through industrialization. Fitfully, the Chinese communists experimented with new ways of organizing production, not content to simply transplant the factory as it developed under capitalism and Stalinism to revolutionary China. The attempts proved deeply controversial, contributing to divisions that nearly split the country apart and ultimately led to a radical political and economic reorientation.
At first, the factory story in communist China seemed like a rerun of the Soviet experience, much like what was occurring in Eastern Europe. After a period of economic recovery following the end of the civil war, in 1953 the communist government, with Soviet advice, launched a Five-Year Plan. Following the Soviet precedent, China’s plan placed heavy emphasis on industry, which accounted for more than half the planned investment in the overwhelmingly agricultural country. Producer goods, especially the iron and steel, machine-building, electric-power, coal, petroleum, and chemical industries, had priority. Six hundred and ninety-four large-scale, capital-intensive projects were to be the driving force for economic growth, a quarter of which were to be built with Soviet assistance. China imported much of the machinery and equipment from the Soviet Union using short-term loans. Like Eastern Europe, China became an heir to an industrial tradition that had traveled from the United States through the Soviet Union, with a stress on specialized tasks and equipment, high-volume output, hierarchical management, and incentive pay.10
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