Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [46]
The girls at Yue Yuen know nothing of the farming cycle. When they go home, their parents don’t usually want them to work; if they help out in the fields, they suffer sunburns and blisters from the unfamiliar labor. One migrant worker described to me a typical day at home: She kept farmers’ hours with the rest of the family but spent most of her day watching television.
I get up at 6:30. I watch TV—News Focus, then the serials. I watch TV until one or two in the afternoon. I take a nap and walk around a bit. I eat dinner and go to bed at ten.
The global calendar of shoe manufacturing also picks up in the spring. The machines gear up in March and quicken in April, May, and June, turning out footwear ahead of the summer shopping season in the United States and Europe. In July—when the farmer’s calendar urges moving fast to bring in the summer harvest before the rains come—the shoe industry falls into a lull. Orders drop to their lowest in August, with production lines sometimes running at only 20 percent of capacity. In September and October, business picks up and the machines run full-time in anticipation of the production crunch to come. November and early December are the go-for-broke periods, with everyone clocking lots of overtime to meet the Christmas rush. After the holidays, the cycle slows until spring comes again.
The girls know the seasons of the shoe intimately, and also its daily rhythms. On the cavernous factory floors of Yue Yuen, making sneakers is a science measured with stopwatches. A plastic sign in front of every station on the assembly line displays how many seconds a worker needs to complete a given task. It takes a Yue Yuen assembly line ten hours to make a shoe, down from twenty-five days four years ago, and the number of shoes produced per worker has gone up 10 percent.
The factory floor has its own hierarchy. The best jobs are in the development department, where workers produce small quantities of shoes for samples and don’t have much production pressure. Cutters and sole-workers are next: As the first people on the assembly line, they set the pace and enjoy more freedom. The highest-stress jobs are in stitching and assembly, where workers are locked into the middle of the production chain. Pressure bears down on them from both ends—people up the line push work on them, while those farther down implore them to move faster. There is little room for error here: Quality inspectors and customers alike zero in on these lower sections of the assembly line, because it is easier to spot flaws in a finished shoe. The workers have a saying:
Those in stitching are scolded to death,
Those in shoe assembly are worked to death,
Those in cutting play to death.
When Yue Yuen set up its first factory in China in 1989, South Korea dominated the global sneaker market. In its first decade here, Yue Yuen often worked employees through midnight and gave them a single day off each month. “As long as you gave the brands the goods at a certain price, they didn’t care how you ran your factories,” says Allen Lee, the head of Yue Yuen’s manufacturing operation for Adidas in Dongguan. “We didn’t talk about whether to pay overtime, or whether to put toilet paper in the bathrooms, or whether workers should wash their hands, or how many slept in each dorm. We used repressive management methods: This is your task and if you have to stay up three days and nights, you do it.”
China’s cheap, motivated workforce was suited to the labor-intensive business of sewing shoes, and in the 1990s China became the global leader. After the big American brands came under attack from unions and workers’ rights groups for harsh conditions in their factories, Nike and Adidas began pushing their suppliers to improve the working environment. Yue Yuen changed to an eleven-hour workday and gave employees