Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [40]
Seventy thousand people work at its Dongguan factory. Imagine the entire population of Santa Fe, New Mexico, under the age of thirty and engaged in making athletic shoes. Inside the compound’s brick walls, workers sleep in factory dorms and eat in factory cafeterias and shop at factory commissaries. Yue Yuen runs a kindergarten for employees’ children and a hospital with a 150-member staff; it has a movie theater and a performance troupe, volunteer activities and English classes. It operates its own power plant and fire department, and sometimes the city of Dongguan borrows Yue Yuen’s firetruck ladder, the tallest one around, to put out fires. Yue Yuen bottles its own water. Locals will tell you that it grows its own food, which is not true, although the company at one point contracted with farmers in the area to guarantee its food sources. Nothing short of apocalypse could cut off the world’s supply of what the industry calls “branded athletic footwear.”
For young migrants, Yue Yuen offers stability. An assembly-line job brings only an average salary—about seventy-two dollars a month in take-home pay, in line with the city’s minimum wage—but it is paid every month, on time. Work is capped at eleven hours a day and sixty hours a week with Sundays off, rare for an industry in which laboring through the night is not unheard of. Yue Yuen workers sleep ten to a room in metal bunks, and this too is better than average. Young women typically pay middlemen one hundred yuan to procure a job here; men pay several times that. Eighty percent of the workers at Yue Yuen are women, most between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.
A migrant who lands a job at Yue Yuen may never work anywhere else. Over the years, she may quit and go home—to see a sick relative or settle a marriage engagement, to have a rest or a child—and then return to Yue Yuen. A worker may introduce a sibling or a cousin or a fellow villager into the factory, and the company encourages this; in one instance, ten members of an extended family all worked inside the factory. Employee turnover is high—5 percent a month, meaning that more than half the workforce changes in a year—but that does not take into account the many workers who quit only to return again. Zhou Yinfang joined Yue Yuen in 1991, when she was seventeen. She met her husband in the factory, took time off to have two children, talked her way into a promotion, and now manages 1,500 workers as a factory chief. “I would like to work here until I retire,” she told me; she was thirty years old, but her voice was already the harsh whisper of an old woman. All of the Yue Yuen bosses, the workers say, have raspy voices from years of shouting orders over the din of the machines.
Upward mobility is possible; the demands of production are so intense that Yue Yuen must promote from within. Almost all of the company’s managers, from supervisors of single lines to the heads of whole factories, are rural migrants who started out on the assembly line. An intricate hierarchy orders this world. Managers are divided into thirteen grades, from trainee to managing director; they typically address each other by title and not by name. One cafeteria is reserved exclusively for production line leaders, while another caters to supervisors, the next step up from them. A child is a status symbol: Only line leaders and above are allowed to live inside the factory as a married couple with a child. Ordinary workers usually leave their children at home in the village, to be minded by grandparents.
Factory society divides along provincial lines. Workers from the same province stick together, speaking dialects that outsiders cannot understand. Those from provinces with large migrant populations further segregate based on which county they come from. Natives of the adjoining provinces of Anhui, Henan, Shaanxi, and Shandong can speak to one another in their own dialects; they call one another “half-fellow