Wonder why more and more Chinese workers/farmers refuse to work for those sweatshops in Guangdong and Fujian? Here is some detail about a sweatshop in ShenZhen.
The factory rule:
1) For each day of sick leave, workers' salary will be reduced 10 Yuan; for each day of personal business, 15 Yuan will be reduced. (Keep in mind a worker only earns 15-20 Yuan a day before food and shelter)
2) Each worker can only go to restroom for 20 times during the business hours (12 hours a day and 30 days a month) in each month, accumulated time is 100 minutes. If anyone goes to restroom more 20 times a month in business hours, each additional time will deduct 2 Yuan from the salary.
In June and July this year, Shenzhen had an unusual high temperature (about 100 Fahrenheit). On July 1st, a female worker name Wan Guirong got a high fever, in the 2nd day, she got a body temperature of 42 Celsius (closed to 108 Fahrenheit degree), which was already out of the range of a regular gauge. When the doctor injected some medicine in her body, the blood could not be stopped as soon as the needle was taken out. She died in the early morning of July 3rd. The business owner claims she suffered a weird disease, and had nothing to do with the heat and the bad working condition. At the mean time, the owners fired a couple of dozens of workers who had skin rash due to the heat.
There are many sweatshops like this one in Guangdong and Fujian. Since the local labor dept. officials usually let sweatshop owners do whatever they want, the only thing workers could do is to go on a strike, though you don’t read these strikes on the news, they happened pretty often.
According to the local labor dept. investigation, in 1998, in ShenZhen only, there were 12,189 workers got work injury. And 90% of them broke their fingers, hands, or arms. More than 80 of them were dead. So on average, in 1998, 31 workers got work injury each day in Shenzhen, and 1 death for every 4.5days.
And here are some good news for US furniture business (although not necessarily good news for US consumers<g>), plenty of furniture sweatshops in Guangdong could not find workers, and a lot of them could only finish 1/3 of the order. |
