Every T-shirt is ironed at least once in its lifetime - as part of the packaging process. At a large textile plant in southern China, employing tens of thousands of workers, young men iron T-shirt after T-shirt at an amazing clip. Their jerky movements are so quick and efficient, it is like watching a video on fast forward.
They do so for eight hours a day, and longer when working overtime. Their piece-rate pay structure is a function of output. The faster they work, the more T-shirts they iron, the more money they make.
More than conditions on the factory floor or in worker dormitories; it is the nature of work itself that is coming under increasing scrutiny after a series of worker suicides at Foxconn, a large Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, and an unprecedented strike at a Honda transmission plant. Both are located in Guangdong's Pearl river delta, a manufacturing belt north of Hong Kong that produces one-third of China's exports.
Workers just don't want to do the same job every day of every week, admits the chief executive of the textile plant, where young men iron t-shirts at fast-forward speed. It's very mind-numbing and must be very depressing.
The problem is that the processes workers find monotonous are valued by companies for their efficiency. Even the textile plant's higher-skilled cutters and sewers are rewarded for quantity as much as quality.
Each worker concentrates on [cutting] one particular piece of the shirt and are paid on a piece-rate basis, the chief executive says. We do try to provide some variety but there is a trade-off with efficiency.
Guangdong government officials, including the province's powerful party secretary, Wang Yang, hope that their export sector's migration to higher tech, higher value manufacturing will change young workers' lives for the better.
But high-tech plants too harbour low-tech assembly processes. At one contract manufacturer that competes with Foxconn, a typical printer line is broken down into 230 worker stations and produces 1,200 printers over the course of an eight-hour shift.
Each worker focuses on one particular task, which they do standing up and which may have been assigned on as random a criterion as height. He or she will also be familiarized with the tasks done by two or three stations before them on the assembly line, in part so they can act as a quality control check on their colleagues' work.
The process is very stratified, a line manager at the plant says proudly. We are constantly examining how we can further optimize the process and realize even higher returns.
But whether Chinese factory workers will continue to support profit maximisation is another question. Judging from recent uprisings in China's south, quick turnover may not be a guarantee in the future.
