THE TRUTH ABOUT APPLE'S FOXCONN WORKERS: They Want To Work MORE, Not Less

[haele]

14. They want to work more because they aren't being paid enough for normal hours -

I heard the latest NPR breakdown on what the investigators for Apple found. The Foxcomm employees were actually being paid less than what the joke of the Chinese labor board mandates, so the 2 to 4 hours a day/night "overtime" they were working - which wasn't being paid at an overtime rate, by the way - allowed them to make comparable wages to the normal hours other companies were giving their employees.

There is also an issue no one talks about - the quality of work that gets done on "overtime". I worked shipyard installation for many years, and have both worked *and supervised* a lot of overtime "running out of time" work on jobs that had been unrealistically scheduled or staffed, unmanaged risks or had poor supply chains.
Having experienced that sort of working condition, I can tell you this - working overtime for short periods of time is okay - the first week normally doesn't see a significant QA issue of an overtime/double-time (60 hr/100hr weeks) schedule.
But if it's a "long term" situation, you start seeing a logarithmic drop - the second week, you generally can expect a 5% increase in QA errors and re-work, the third week, around a 12% increase, and by the fourth week, a full quarter of the work produced is crap. And it doesn't matter what "culture" your workers come from; I've managed jobs in foreign countries with workers that were desperate to show what type of hard workers and how dedicated to work they were, but their bodies and minds just couldn't keep up with the stress of long hours of continuous repetitive work over a two/three week period of time.
No matter how eager your workers are to get the job done, they can't keep up a quality overtime schedule for more than a few weeks.
And Foxcomm employees are doing this for months at a time? I think I've found one of the reasons that one in three electronic devices fail by the time you take them home and the ones you don't have to return immediately are so poorly made that the average usable lifespan is about a year before they have to be replaced...

Haele