New York Times Profiles A 24 Year Old Foxconn Factory Worker

Meet 24 year old Yuan Yandong, one of almost 500,000 workers employed by Foxconn. From 7:30 pm to 5:30 am, Yandong works the night shift, monotonously putting together over 1,600 hard drives a shift.

His task is to help complete 1,600 hard drives – his workshop’s daily quota – and to make sure every one is perfect. Seated in the middle of the assembly line in his black Foxconn sports shirt, cotton slacks and company-mandated white plastic slippers, he waits for the conveyor belt to deliver a partly assembled rectangular hard drive to his station. He places two plastic chips inside the drive’s casing, inserts a device that redirects light in the drive and then fastens four screws with an electric screwdriver before sending the drive down the line. He has exactly one minute to complete the multistep task.

Although Yandon describes the work as numbing, this New York Times profile piece does not make Yandong’s work seem particularly hellish. Perhaps the most disturbing detail in the entire piece is that Yandong is unaware that he is only legally allowed to work a maximimum of 36 overtime hours a month, saying that he more commonly works twice as much overtime, especially when big orders come in.

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Working at Foxconn looks tedious make no mistake, but it doesn’t look obviously hellish: the psychological factors at play that are driving Foxconn’s workers are a lot more subtle than whip-lashing taskmasters.

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About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Andrew
1,600 Hard drives at 1 minute per unit is a 26.666 hour day? That’s a long day in anyone’s book?
Church of Apple
@Andrew
I saw that too, I’m guessing they have more than just that one line of production?
firesign3000
It’s a boring and tedious factory job, much like millions of other repetitive factory jobs all over the world. The prospect of doing the same mind numbing task over and over for years and years would be enough to make a lot of people jump off a roof, even if the place was a country club.
king
can’t they substitute a machine for doing repetitive tasks?
Also I am aware that in such factories,they shift employees jobs so they kill boredom and the employee feels refreshed .
So one week he might be doing hard-drives , next week wrapping and so on
Quill
Actually, people can be more cost-efficient for assembling products with short product cycles. With a factory machine, you have to redesign and rebuild it every time you change the product; people just have to be retrained.
To compare, garment factory workers in Cambodia make about $50 a month. Many would be willing to assemble electronics for $200 a month.
Fuzzypig
If we want the shiny goodies as the prices we can just about afford, this is the side the ad men don’t want us to know about. Workers basically being bored to death by reptetive jobs.
It’s almost like what happened during the industrial revolution here in the UK about 250 years ago. Many people moved to the cities and towns to get work, the money was reasonable and better than they had before, but the downside was that the company owned you, body and soul. Lots of injuries and people losing their marbles. I can imagine in 5 years time, lots of people coming up with lawsuits for RSI type issues.
The guy in the story seems a little too clued up for my liking, he’s too happy. I appreciate that Foxconn are not going to wheel out the poor sod in his 3rd year of work, mind almost shot to pieces by the mind-numbing work. The guy in the story, if is genuine, is hardly likely to stay he’s sick and tired of the work but stays because the money saved means one day he might be able to find a slightly more satisfying job is he?
Smacks of a PR exercise by Foxconn and nothing more.
Paul
disturbing, the amount they get paid will be nothing compared to the amount they generate…
HandyMac
Btw, John, Yandong is his personal name (what we would call a “first” name, though in Chinese it comes second, after the family name). I believe the usual journalistic style is to refer to a person in a story like this by his surname, thus: “Although Yuan describes the work as numbing, this New York Times profile piece does not make Yuan’s work seem particularly hellish.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_names
I See
Equally as disgusting in the treatment of workers at Foxconn are the hedonistic buyers of iPhones, oblivious to the treatment of the workers who make their toys because they are either ignorant or don’t care about their fellow man. But the finger of blame must be pointed directly at Terry Gou, Steven Jobs and the corrupt Chinese government. These two billionaries line their pockets by leveraging the blood sweat and tears of the workers, capitalising on the corrupt anti-Marxist Chinese government. The counter revolutionary government must be be cleansed. Corrupt officials from top down must be charged with treason against the people of China and punished accordingly.