Discipline is another point of contention. In many giant Chinese factories, discipline is harsh and degrading. Firms commonly impose fines for negligent work and even minor rule violations, like talking or laughing on the job, recalling English textile factories, where, Marx noted, “punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages, and the law-giving talent of the factory Lycurgus so arranges matters, that a violation of his laws is, if possible, more profitable to him than the keeping of them.” (By contrast, fines as a form of labor discipline are illegal in Vietnam.) Some foreign managers believe that especially strict disciplinary measures are required in China because of a lax pace of work inherited from socialism, along with a culture of everyone “eating from the same rice bowl,” collective rather than individual effort and reward.
At Foxconn, supervisors verbally abuse workers for breaking minor rules. In one instance, a supervisor forced a worker to copy quotations from CEO Gou three hundred times—a cross between schoolhouse punishment and the Cultural Revolution. Security guards sometimes beat up workers suspected of theft or simply violating a rule (shades of the Service Department at River Rouge). Some Chinese factories hire off-duty policemen as guards, giving them a sense of impunity.56
Xu Lizhi, a Foxconn worker who committed suicide in 2014, addressed factory discipline in a poem, “Workshop, My Youth Was Stranded Here,” published in the company newspaper, Foxconn People:
Beside the assembly line, tens of thousands of workers line up like words on a page,
“Faster, hurry up!”
Standing among them, I hear the supervisor bark.
In “I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That,” he wrote:
They’ve trained me to become docile
Don’t know how to shout or rebel
How to complain or denounce
Only how to silently suffer exhaustion.57
Some giant Asian factories have had severe health and safety problems. In 1997, an internal report commissioned by Nike found serious problems with toxic chemicals in a large Korean-owned contracting plant in Vietnam. Levels of toluene in the air far exceeded both U.S. and Vietnamese standards. Pervasive dust and oppressive heat and noise added to the poor conditions. In China, too, exposure to toluene, along with benzene and xylene, created hazardous conditions in footwear factories. Chemical solvents used to clean screens are a hazard in electronics factories. Aluminum dust, from making and polishing cases for iPads, presents another danger; workers breathe it in and it can be highly explosive. A 2011 blast at the Foxconn Chengdu plant caused by the dust killed four workers and severely injured eighteen others.58
In Lowell, boardinghouses, centers of sociability and relaxation albeit strictly regulated by the companies, provided something of a respite from the monotony, fatigue, and regimentation of the factory. At many Chinese factories that is less the case. About a quarter of Foxconn’s Shenzhen workers live in company housing, one of the thirty-three dormitories inside its factory complexes or the one hundred and twenty dorms it rents nearby. Foxconn dorm rooms typically house six to twelve workers, more than housed in Lowell boardinghouse rooms, though unlike in Lowell, each worker has her or his own bunk bed. (Many Taiwanese-owned factories also have higher-grade housing for managers.) Workers are assigned to rooms randomly, so that friends, relatives, workers from the same production area, or workers from the same region rarely bunk together. With some roommates working day shifts and others at night, disruptions come regularly and rooms cannot be used for socializing. As in Lowell, strict rules regulate dormitory behavior: curfews are enforced, visitors restricted, and cooking forbidden.59
But many industrial giants, including some though not all Foxconn plants, have extensive on-site social and recreational facilities that provide opportunities for relaxation, socializing, and entertainment. Foxconn City, in addition to dormitories, production buildings, and warehouses, includes a library, bookstores, a variety of cafeterias and restaurants, supermarkets, extensive sports facilities including swimming pools, basketball courts, soccer fields, and a stadium, a movie theater, electronic game rooms, cybercafés, a wedding-dress shop, banks, ATMs, two hospitals, a fire station, a post office, and huge LED screens that show announcements and cartoons. In 2012, a central kitchen used three tons of pork and thirteen tons of rice every day to feed workers. Another company’s factory complex, where workers made small motors for electronic devices and automobile accessories, contained a skating rink, basketball courts, badminton fields, table-tennis courts, billiards, and a cybercafé (though workers complained about the lack of Wi-Fi in the dormitories).
At Foxconn City, the giant outdoor television screens and extensive shopping and recreational venues brought consumer modernity into the plant itself, offering workers a taste of the world they left their villages seeking. Migrant workers often quickly assimilate to it. Journalist James Fallows wrote after visiting Longhua in 2012, “At factories I’d previously seen across China, workers looked and acted like country people weathered by their rough upbringing. Most of the Foxconn employees looked like they could have come from a junior college.” Many second-generation migrant workers own—or are saving to own—the products they themselves make that symbolize modernity, like smartphones and stylish footwear and apparel.60
Militant Workers
Fallows sees China as a feel-good story, a country rapidly moving from working-class living conditions like those in William Blake’s England to those like in the United States in the 1920s, and continuing upward. Since China began allowing foreign entities to build and run factories, there has been an enormous decline in poverty, also the case in Vietnam. According to World Bank data, between 1981 and 2012 more than a half billion Chinese rose above a poverty line defined as living on the equivalent (in 2011 dollars) of $1.90 a day or less. Life expectancy at birth rose from sixty-seven in 1981 to seventy-six in 2014. Nonetheless, even at the most modern industrial giants in China and Vietnam, factories with pay and conditions above local norms, workers have repeatedly expressed their dissatisfaction through high turnover rates, strikes, and protests.
In recent decades, China has experienced a massive, if not well publicized, strike wave. The China Labour Bulletin details 180 strikes in 2014 and 2015 that involved a thousand or more workers, estimating that it has information on only 10 to 15 percent of all strikes that occurred. By contrast, during those same two years, there were only thirty-three strikes with a thousand or more workers in the United States.61
All kinds of factories in China have been hit by walkouts—large and small, state-owned and privately owned. Strikes have occurred at leading industrial giants in the electronic and footwear industries over pay, benefits, and working hours. Tactics, beyond stopping work, have included threatening suicides, blocking roads, and marching on government offices. With many strikers living in company dormitories, stoppages often become de facto occupations or sit-downs.
Even the largest contract manufacturers have been affected. In 2012, 150 workers at a Foxconn plant in Wuhan spent two days on a building roof threatening to jump off to protest a pay cut that accompanied their transfer from Shenzhen and conditions in the new plant. In the Spring of 2014, most of the forty thousand workers at a Yue Yuen factory in Guangdong Province struck to demand that the firm comply with a law obligating it to make pension contributions, one of the largest single-site strikes China has seen. Some protests have been violent. Workers at the Foxconn Chengdu plant rioted several times in fury over uninhabitable dormitory conditions and pay cuts. In one case, it took two hundred police officers to end the protest.
Chinese strikes occur in a legal gray zone. For years, workers had a right to strike, encoded in the constitutions of 1975 and 1978. But in 1982, as the government moved to attract foreign investment and reject the mass mobilizations of the Cultural Revolution, the right was removed from the fundamental law. Now workers cannot openly organize or publicize job actions. But they strike nonetheless. Most walkouts arise with l
ittle if any prior organization, no union involvement, and no clear leaders, and last a day or two at most. Often they end when the government intervenes to mediate.
As long as the stoppages are local, short, and nonpolitical, the government generally tolerates them. But if they get out of hand or last too long, physical force and arrests are used to break them up. Authorities want to make sure that labor turbulence does not drive away foreign investors or threaten the political status quo. For their part, foreign factory owners seem confident that the government will keep labor militancy under control, not hesitating to concentrate production in very large plants that if shut down would halt most or all production of particular goods.62
Strikes are even more common in Vietnam than China. Workers there have a legal right to strike, though in practice most walkouts have taken place without the elaborate steps necessary for authorization. Worker strikes hit large South Korean and Taiwanese-owned factories making shoes for Nike, Adidas, and other global brands in 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2015. The gigantic 2011 strike at the Yue Yuen factory, protesting low wages, captured international attention for its sheer size.
Even more startling were the riots three years later, which damaged or destroyed scores of foreign-owned factories outside of Ho Chi Minh City. The disturbances began with a rally of workers protesting China’s deployment of an oil rig into waters claimed by Vietnam. But the protesters soon turned against nearby sneaker and clothing factories, many of which were Taiwanese, South Korean, Japanese, or Malaysian owned, angry about stagnating wages and foreign exploitation. A staff person at the Taiwanese Chutex Garment Factory reported that some eight thousand to ten thousand workers were involved in an attack on the plant, burning “everything, all of the materials, computers, machines.”63
In China, worker militancy has pushed up wages and improved conditions, aided by pressure from international labor rights groups and brand companies afraid of their reputations being sullied by stories of worker abuse. Even so, by the 2010s large factories were having difficulty recruiting and retaining migrant workers. The rapid expansion of manufacturing, a shrinking rural population, a gender imbalance favoring men, and the growth of service-sector female employment meant that the pool of young women from the countryside that the factories preferred was effectively tapped out. Foxconn and other firms were forced to broaden their hiring practices, turning to men—who now constitute the majority of Foxconn employees—and older workers.64
Companies responded to rising wages and labor shortages by building new plants in lower-wage regions of central China. Many also turned to semicoercive measures to recruit and retain workers, echoes—though much attenuated—of practices from the earliest days of the factory. Some companies insisted that migrant workers make “deposits” to obtain their jobs, which would only be refunded if they left with permission of the firm. Similarly, companies withheld parts of workers’ wages, promising to pay them at the end of the year.65 Larger factories, under greater scrutiny and more attuned to international standards, were less likely to engage in such tactics. Instead, they turned to student interns as a new, cheap labor supply.
Chinese vocational schools require completion of a six-month or one-year internship before graduation. Foxconn and other firms have exploited this requirement by working with government and educational authorities to have large numbers of student interns sent to their factories, along with their teachers, who serve as de facto foremen and forewomen. In the summer of 2010, Foxconn had 150,000 interns, including more than 28,000 making Apple products at its Guanlan factory in Shenzhen. Generally, interns engage in basic production jobs that have no relationship to their field of study. Instead, the internships are simply enforced labor—students can leave, but doing so jeopardizes their ability to graduate. Interns receive basic entry-level wages but no benefits, making them cheaper than regular employees. Though not bound labor like parish apprentices in English textile mills, the students, who have become an increasingly important component of the Chinese factory labor force, are not exactly free workers hired through an open labor market, either. Rather, they are mobilized by state-company institutional arrangements that give them no real freedom of choice.66
Hiding in Plain Sight
The giant factory in China and Vietnam has not received the kind of notice it did in its earlier incarnations in England, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. Considerable attention has been paid to the plight of migrant Chinese workers, particularly in film, but much less to the factories they work in.67 Part of the reason is the secretiveness of factory owners, who for the most part see only a downside in allowing their facilities to be visited or documented. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, companies saw their factories as good advertising, symbols of their position at the cutting edge of industry and a way to get their products better known among consumers. Soviet and Eastern European authorities viewed their giant factories as showcases for socialism, also appealing, in a different way, to a broad public. By contrast, owners of giant Chinese and Vietnamese manufacturing enterprises do not want anything to do with the public. For the most part, their customers are not end users but other companies. And as far as those companies go, by and large the less known about the manufacturing processes the better.
For one thing, companies like Apple and Adidas want to keep secret proprietary methods and details about products about to be introduced. For another, they fear criticism of the working conditions under which their products are made, including by international social-justice groups adept at circulating images and information about worker abuse. While ordinary tourists could visit River Rouge, and still can, the idea is unthinkable with Foxconn plants or most other giant factories in China. Scholars, journalists, and documentarians have great difficulty getting past factory gates, and when they do, they are closely guided by minders, not given full access. The leading media of their day were awash with images of English textile mills, Lowell, Homestead, the Stalingrad Tractorstroi, and Nowa Huta. By contrast, photographs of factories owned by Foxconn, Pegatron, and Yue Yuen are surprisingly uncommon, and pictures of what goes on inside them rarer still.68
Because the largest Asian factories do not serve as advertisements or symbols for the products made within them, there is no incentive to invest in distinctive or innovative architecture, as leading manufacturers did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is no Belper Round Mill or FIAT Lingotto in China. Instead, there are generic factory buildings, modern looking but utterly lacking ornamentation or distinguishing features, even the distinctive fenestration that once marked major manufacturing sites. Many Chinese plants look like they could be suburban office buildings. Bloomberg Businessweek described Foxconn City, with its multistory buildings faced in gray or white concrete, as “drab and utilitarian.” In recent decades, China has been the leading world center for hiring celebrity architects to build unusual, large-scale, modernist structures, but they are office buildings, concert halls, stadiums, museums, libraries, shopping malls, and hotels, not factories.69
Recently built factories in China and Vietnam are not held up as sources of national pride, as steel mills in Braddock, Pennsylvania, and Nowa Huta once had been. Unlike the showcase factory giants of the past, the new massive factories in China and Vietnam are largely foreign owned, run by foreign managers, making goods largely for consumption out of the country. Rather than symbolizing how advanced their host countries are, they serve as reminders of how much catching up they have to do to match countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan in technology, design, and management.
Many leaders in the developing world, including China, do not see having locally owned, large-scale manufacturing as their real target nor as a badge of entry to the club of First World nations. They are acutely aware that rich countries like the United States have been shedding mass-production manufacturing, concentrating instead on higher-end production of specialized goods, design, technological innovation, marketing, services
, and finance. Basic manufacturing, for better or worse, seems like yesterday in much of the advanced world, especially the United States, an attitude picked up in less developed countries. Modernity does not mean the assembly line for Chinese policy makers and elites. Rather, they see mass manufacturing as a stage to go through and leave behind in achieving modernity. Chinese officials still see a role for mass production in raising living standards; they hope to hold on to lower-end, lower-paid manufacturing by moving it into poorer interior regions. But in wealthier parts of the country, including pioneer special economic zones, the push is to move beyond basic assembly-line production. In Shenzhen, the epicenter of the explosion of Chinese industrial giantism, older factories are being knocked down to build upscale residential and commercial buildings.70
Seen more as a necessity than a triumph, giant Chinese and Vietnamese factories are devoid of the heroic overtones associated with earlier large-scale industrial projects or with modern Chinese infrastructure projects like the Three Gorges Dam or the skyscrapers, bridges, and high-speed rail lines that have remade the landscape. In part, this is an issue of gender; modern apparel, footwear, and electronic plants are heavily staffed by women, unlike steel and automobile factories and big construction sites, where men have dominated the workforce, and largely still do. Heavily female industries sometimes have been associated with utopian dreams, like the early New England textile mills, but Promethean daring generally has been associated with brawny male workers, workers resembling the common portrayal of Prometheus himself.71
The nature of the products that pour out of Asian factory giants contributes to their banality. The twenty-first-century factories with the most employees typically churn out small things, like coffeepots, sneakers, or smartphones, which could fit into a small box or the palm of a hand, not the large, awe-inspiring cannons, beams, machines, vehicles, and aircraft produced by the largest nineteenth- and twentieth-century factories. Billions of people worldwide may want iPhones or Nike sneakers and see them as symbols of modernity, but these accessories lack the world-historic aura of the products that came out of the giant steel mills and auto plants of yore.
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