Last week there were a few visitors from the states. It is always fun to see people from home. First, Jessica, a friend of my friend Iris visited. I had only met her a few times before but she is a really nice girl. It was her first time in China but being from New York and all she was way less awestruck by Shanghai than the last visitors from the states we met.
The next visitor I met was a friend of my parents, Nissen, who has a factory in China and comes out here every now and then. I was really curious to see a Chinese factory, it is such an important part of the culture. They do make just about everything in China and you always hear so much about labor conditions and Chinese factories. I've listened to a few NPR reports about work conditions and I really wanted to see what one was like.
We met Nissen and his business partner Rotem at the train station in Kunshan, about 20 minutes outside Shanghai. Kunshan is a city of about a million people, a similar population to Philadelphia but there isn't much there besides factories. Nissen took us to his factory and gave us a quick tour before we went out to lunch. He told Danny all about the electronics parts his company made. I was way more interested in seeing what the workers do and how conditions were for them. I pretty much assumed it would be fairly decent place since he offered to take us around.
It is a small factory, only around 300 employees. I'm not sure how it compares to other factories in China. He joked that it wasn't exactly Foxconn (the company that makes the parts for almost all our computers and other little gadgets). The NPR article said there were 400,000 employees at Foxconn and they all live in dorms on the company's premises and eat all their meals in the company's cafeterias.
Nissen's factory didn't have dormitories. He did tell us most employers prefer to have them because it is cheaper for the company than having to give them a housing allowance. They did have a cafeteria though. The factory was clean and looked pretty safe. It had a nice lobby and a board room in front and a few offices for the management. The factory itself was only running a few lines when we visited because it was the weekend. It was still interesting to see the precision with which each worker completed their tasks. He said the workers change lines a lot depending on what they are making. I think that's good because it would be incredibly boring to sit and do the same tedious repetitive task every day. Anyway I look at it, it is not an amazing job, but that is what happens in you are an unskilled laborer in China. Most of the people there just want to earn as much as possible and get lots of overtime pay to send home to their families. Nissen told us it is hard to keep employees from leaving unless you can give them lots of overtime work. Overall it was a really interesting little visit. I saw my first Chinese factory. Nissen is a really nice guy and humored me through all my silly questions. Afterwards we got lunch at an Italian restaurant and chatted a bit. He had a video of my parents and all their friends saying hello to us that he recorded just before his trip. It was really nice seeing someone from home.
By random coincidence the week after I saw his factory one of my student's mother organized a trip for us to another factory. This time it was a pharmaceutical company. They talked to the kids about how the process of producing and distributing all the medicines worked. It was all in Chinese but I had one of the kids translate for me. I didn't get to ask all kinds of questions about the workers though, the kids were supposed to be there to learn about math related concepts. The only part of the factory we saw was them putting things in boxes. I'm not allowed to have pictures of either place because they want to keep their technology and the inner workings of the factories secret from competing companies. I think I now feel like I have somewhat gotten the Chinese factory tour experience but I'm still really curious what Foxconn is like.
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