Microsoft workers: Too tired to stay awake, the Chinese workers earning just 34p an hour

[OhioChick]

The image Microsoft doesn't want you to see: Too tired to stay awake, the Chinese workers earning just 34p an hour

17th April 2010


Showing Chinese sweatshop workers slumped over their desks with exhaustion, it is an image that Microsoft won't want the world to see.

Employed for gruelling 15-hour shifts, in appalling conditions and 86f heat, many fall asleep on their stations during their meagre ten-minute breaks.

For as little as 34p an hour, the men and women work six or seven days a week, making computer mice and web cams for the American multinational computer company.

This photo and others like it were smuggled out of the KYE Systems factory at Dongguan, China, as part of a three-year investigation by the National Labour Committee, a human rights organisation which campaigns for workers across the globe.

The mostly female workers, aged 18 to 25, work from 7.45am to 10.55pm, sometimes with 1,000 workers crammed into one 105ft by 105ft room.

They are not allowed to talk or listen to music, are forced to eat substandard meals from the factory cafeterias, have no bathroom breaks during their shifts and must clean the toilets as discipline, according to the NLC.

The workers also sleep on site, in factory dormitories, with 14 workers to a room. They must buy their own mattresses and bedding, or else sleep on 28in-wide plywood boards. They 'shower' with a sponge and a bucket.

And many of the workers, because they are young women, are regularly sexually harassed, the NLC claimed.


Much More: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1266643/Microsofts-Chinese-workforce-tired-stay-awake.html

[FreakinDJ]

1. The "Benefits of Free Trade"

[glowing]

2. Its a race to the bottom all the way back to slavery worldwide...

[PSPS]

3. The much vaunted "capitalism" at work.

On the one hand, you have the slaves. Worn out: Some of the workers making computer accessories for Microsoft at a Chinese factory:



On the other hand, you have the parasites. Here's Bill Gates' "house."

[northernlights]

6. but...but...but Bill Gates gave billions to his favorite charities

so really, that makes his enslaving others so he can play "Big Daddy" ok, doesn't it? :sarcasm:

I mean, after all, if he paid the slaves a living wage, they'd just waste it on...living, wouldn't they?

[Gman2]

4. But glenn Beck said that globalization was for ending world wars, and

nukular annihilation. So, it's either this, or we just blow ourselves up. Duh.

[Cirque du So-What]

5. Cheap-labor conservatism's wet dream

a workforce to whom shit wages are paid for slaving away under appalling conditions. This is how the capitalistas would have everyone work if they had the opportunity.

[slay]

7. Capitalists feeding off communists - the whole thing is sickening

it's sickening that China would allow this to happen. it's sickening that Microsoft would participate in this kind of inhumane behavior. but with capitalism it's all about the profit and if doing business this way makes microsoft more $$$$, they do it. it's disgusting, and should be criminal. :( :puke:

if we don't start taxing these companies that ship jobs overseas a shitload they will always choose this route - costing US jobs as well. :mad: