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By Root 1340 0

every Sunday off; many workers quit, complaining that the overtime pay was no longer enough. The company set up a business unit to oversee working conditions and a counseling center where workers could seek help and file complaints. It improved safety measures, banned hazardous chemicals, and abolished military-style calisthenics. Yet even as the brands have pushed factories to treat workers better, they are also pressuring them to cut costs. At times these goals work at cross-purposes. The Yue Yuen plant for Adidas used to issue workers’ uniforms free of charge. Because of cost-cutting pressure from Adidas, Yue Yuen started charging workers for uniforms, but Adidas objected to this practice too. Yue Yuen abolished uniforms altogether, and workers now wear their own clothes on the job.

In 2001, Adidas initiated a program called Lean Manufacturing to increase efficiency and reduce waste at Yue Yuen. Workers say that while they work shorter hours now, the time on the line is more stressful; tasks are parceled out precisely and there is almost no downtime. Assembly lines have been restructured into small teams so workers can switch tasks every few days, whereas before they might have done the same thing for a month at a time. This makes production more flexible, but it is exhausting for the workers. Also in the name of efficiency, living arrangements have been reshuffled so workers live with their assembly-line colleagues rather than with their friends.

The accelerating pace of the global fashion cycle increases the pressure. A decade ago, the big athletic-shoe brands gave factories ninety days from receiving an order to delivering a product; several years ago it was sixty days, and now it is thirty days. Orders are getting smaller, to allow for a rapid response when fashions change, and workers live inside this unpredictable cycle. Only on Thursday does their boss tell them if they must work overtime on Saturday. During busy times, the sole department runs double shifts; employees take turns working the day shift one month and the night shift the next, their internal clocks scrambled and their bodies struggling to catch up.

Executives say that the demands of the market have only made Yue Yuen better. “If we didn’t have pressure, we wouldn’t improve,” says Allen Lee. “As Darwin said, only the strongest survive.” An Adidas study found that workers initially felt stress from the Lean Manufacturing program, but over time, the study said, they got used to it.

* * *

August is the time to irrigate corn and prepare to plant the winter wheat. Inside the Yue Yuen factory, a new season was starting earlier than expected: the long approach to Christmas. After the easy pace of summer, the girls were working overtime every weekday and all day Saturday. On the assembly line, they worked faster and talked less. But their bodies rebelled.

“I have the worst headache,” complained Qianqian one morning in early August. “This is supposed to be the low season, but we have so many orders.” The day before, she had turned twenty-two; she had planned to visit her best friend to celebrate but spent her birthday working overtime instead.

Down the hall in Room J805, Jia Jimei had returned to the factory from her visit home. She sat on her lower bunk, listless and unsmiling.

“How was home?” I asked her.

She smiled briefly. “It was good.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I thought about not returning,” she said slowly, as if she were just waking from a dream. “But there is nothing to do at home. If there were something to do near home, it would be better to be close to home. But there isn’t. I feel very uncomfortable being back here. I don’t really want to go back to work again.”

In the bunk above, Wu Yongli was more cheerful. She was nineteen years old, with pretty features in a slender face, and on this summer morning she wore an elegant black dress with spaghetti straps and a choker with a heart-shaped locket. “Don’t mind her,” Wu Yongli said. “She hasn’t adjusted to being back yet.” More jarring change was on the horizon: Once a year, the factory