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The Changing Face of Shenzhen, the World's Gadget Factory
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/beyond-foxconn-inside-shenzhen-the-worlds-gadget-factoryWages have gone up recently, we’re told, in order to encourage workers to stay in Shenzhen, or to return from visits to their families in the country. It seems concerns about food shortages have increased wages for agricultural workers in order to discourage them from leaving for the cities. It’s notoriously hard to get ahold of reliable figures in China, but according to a 2014 report from the Overseas Development Institute, a UK think tank, average earnings for male rural workers more than doubled between 1997 and 2007, rising from $3.02 to over $7 a day—numbers still shockingly low compared to wages in the US and Europe. Nonetheless, it’s an important reminder that rural areas are just as vital as cities, and that China’s industrial explosion is a complex balancing act between the two; these astronomical levels of growth are fuelled just as much by food as they are foreign investment and cheap labour.
We see more proof of this as we’re invited to have lunch in one the factory’s three canteens: a huge three-level food court complex. Each canteen serves 3,000 workers a day. Watched over by CCTV cameras, hordes of teenage employees in short sleeved uniforms—color-coded depending on which line they work—sit at fast-food restaurant style tables, eating meat and rice and drinking garishly artificial looking fruit juices. Everyone is over 16; many appear in their early 20s, but it’s hard not to think of a busy high-school cafeteria as they talk, laugh, and gossip. But this isn’t a school—most of these kids will have had basic, minimal educations before they arrive—this is the powerhouse behind China’s economic boom, the workforce that keeps the world’s factory floor running.
And, increasingly, that factory floor is expanding outside of China itself. Just as the government struggles to maintain the balance between the city and the country, it also has to balance aspirations and profits. The promise of a better quality of life is what draws workers to Shenzhen, but the the price is a rise in the once-low cost of labor that first gave the city its competitive edge.
Many companies like TCL are now in fact outsourcing their manufacturing to other nations. As we leave the visitors center, Katharine shows us a bank of TV screens that display feeds from their other production lines around China and Asia and, to my surprise, their new factory in Poland. As an EU citizen, I was shocked to learn a Chinese TV manufacturer is outsourcing labor to a Eurozone country, but TCL is not the only one. Poland has an astonishing 14 SEZs, many of which house Chinese manufacturing.
We see more proof of this as we’re invited to have lunch in one the factory’s three canteens: a huge three-level food court complex. Each canteen serves 3,000 workers a day. Watched over by CCTV cameras, hordes of teenage employees in short sleeved uniforms—color-coded depending on which line they work—sit at fast-food restaurant style tables, eating meat and rice and drinking garishly artificial looking fruit juices. Everyone is over 16; many appear in their early 20s, but it’s hard not to think of a busy high-school cafeteria as they talk, laugh, and gossip. But this isn’t a school—most of these kids will have had basic, minimal educations before they arrive—this is the powerhouse behind China’s economic boom, the workforce that keeps the world’s factory floor running.
And, increasingly, that factory floor is expanding outside of China itself. Just as the government struggles to maintain the balance between the city and the country, it also has to balance aspirations and profits. The promise of a better quality of life is what draws workers to Shenzhen, but the the price is a rise in the once-low cost of labor that first gave the city its competitive edge.
Many companies like TCL are now in fact outsourcing their manufacturing to other nations. As we leave the visitors center, Katharine shows us a bank of TV screens that display feeds from their other production lines around China and Asia and, to my surprise, their new factory in Poland. As an EU citizen, I was shocked to learn a Chinese TV manufacturer is outsourcing labor to a Eurozone country, but TCL is not the only one. Poland has an astonishing 14 SEZs, many of which house Chinese manufacturing.
