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I don't know where people get the idea people are semi-enslaved in factories.. Having lived in China, in my second hand experience Chinese worker protection law

I don't know where people get the idea people are semi-enslaved in factories.. Having lived in China, in my second hand experience Chinese worker protection laws are quite strict. Somewhere between US and Europe. It's not really easy to fire people and people regularly sue their employers and win. The legal system is generally very heavily biased towards the little guy I just feel really bad for these people. They probably left some country side life making peanuts to go make some real money for a while at a factory and like send their kids to college or whatever - and now westerners are like "no, you shouldn't do that. go back to your bucolic life of poverty. And btw we hate your government". Cool From the initial reports it sounds like Foxxcon really royally screwed up and was not prepared logistically for a lockdown. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63739562 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63739562 Another big part of this whole fiasco seems to have been conspiracy-theory style rumors and just a general freakout of the workers (which is kinda understandable given how policies are opaque and feel arbitrary) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63481793 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63481793 "This young factory worker heard that the army was going to come in and take control so as to enforce a type of giant "living with Covid" experiment which involved allowing everyone in that part of Zhengzhou city to get sick." In my experience.. even talking to educated middle class people.. these kinds of things are super common - even with all the social media controls. People believe all sorts of insane things b/c their sister's husband's cousin is in the army and told them blah blah. If in the US a double digit percentage of people believe that 9/11 was inside job - in the developing world the numbers are way scarier. It sounds like there was mass panic (again, kinda understandable given the mushroom management that's so common in Asia)

philliphaydon 4y ago
> Chinese worker protection laws are quite strict. The fact 996 is illegal and still practiced and complained about and censored… makes any existence of protection laws being strict null and void.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Who can honestly say they did not ever flaunt worktime laws (where they exist)? IT people do 60-80 hours, in the liberal-democratic country where there is a strict limit of 48 hours/week (and the average being around 39h). People wear that as a misplaced badge of honour - and often complain behind closed doors. Sounds similar.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I've been living in Asia for 11 or 12 years now. There is definitely a strange culture of over-working. Young people who live at home with their parents sometimes work late because they don't want to go home to their parents. Alot of other people work late because they want to get noticed for promotions etc. Some of it's self-inflicted. The first company I worked for in Singapore, the 'suits' as they are called (glorified sales people) would take requests from clients and commit at 6pm to deliverying the fixes by morning, then requesting the developers stay and do the work while they go home. So there are definitely, 100% scenarios where it's not the company itself directly demanding employees to doing insane hours. But it does happen, China requires non-overtime hours to be capped at 36 hours. People are often not compensated for any extra hours they do.
    - throwawaaay129 4y ago
      Yeah, I think it's a scenario where you can probably sue and you can probably win - but then (just like in the US) you're known as the person that sues their employer and it's a black mark. I haven't heard of people getting lawsuits about 996 thrown out in China - but to be fair I also haven't heard of people suing over that either.
      - fyresala 4y ago
        > but to be fair I also haven't heard of people suing over that either. Guess why
- powerapple 4y ago
  the labour law was mainly for factory workers, there overtime needs to be compensated. For office workers, it is not clearly defined, because typically you are evaluated by works done, not by time as factory workers.
ngcc_hk 4y ago
It is not the law or the occasional protection. It is when it is not working, the threat as experienced by local that is the issue. Not to mention the overall issue of human suppression. It is not helping by producing and buying china. Anyway, I think they moved is not because of this though. More because the unstable situation. And the invasion of Taiwan is inevitable. I will do it if I am in power. Not because I want to but I have to. That is the problem. And if that happened, what you do. Like German or EU on Russia oil. How many lesson you have to learn before you call yourselves …
pera 4y ago
Your experience seems very different from what several international human rights organisations have been reporting for the past two decades. I'd like to invite everyone here to follow for instance CLW: https://chinalaborwatch.org/ https://chinalaborwatch.org/
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >I'd like to invite everyone here to follow for instance CLW Unfortunately, I think we're well past the days where you can simply say, "The WHO says..." or "the CDC says..." or "<some random NGO> says..." and expect anyone to believe it's some source of truth. As we speak, we're literally in the middle of multiple supposedly trustworthy institutions being exposed for bending the truth or creating a narrative for political reasons. There's a cold war with China in progress. In my country we're dealing with issues related to political influence by the Chinese. Even so, I'm trying to be careful that what I read isn't merely anti-Chinese propaganda, because I don't pretend we're not guilty of that ourselves.
hackernewds 4y ago
This reads oddly like propaganda and flies against any and all of the evidence that we regularly observe, including the protests against working conditions that we are observing now
- mikymoothrowa 4y ago
  China does have some of the best worker protection laws. The protests we’re observing now, including the one in the iphone city, are against the government. Let’s not conflate the two.
  - rwalle 4y ago
    Wow, "are against the government", that's really some typical CCP talk seen in their smear campaign. From what I can see people just want a bit of freedom and get their promised compensation. I doubt any of the workers has interest in overthrowing the government.
    - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
      I'm not sure where you're from but for a good majority of the world, protesting against the government and wanting to overthrow the government are two very different things. I am talking about the former. The sorry state the west has devolved into in the last 2 years.
  - woooooo 4y ago
    There was a different protest at a factory in shenzhen, prior to the lockdown protests.
- itsoktocry 4y ago
  >This reads oddly like propaganda and flies against any and all of the evidence that we regularly observe What evidence are you observing that has convinced you it's one way or the other? I can go on Twitter and see some variant of the first comment and the second in almost every thread. What are you reading that you consider the "ground truth" that you can so easily point out the propaganda? As a Canadian, I'm sure my sources are similar to yours, and I'm not really sure what the truth is. I assume it's somewhere in the middle. One thing I do know is that both "sides" are churning out propaganda at an unprecedented pace.
fyresala 4y ago
Your views of labor law are completely wrong. > in my second hand experience Chinese worker protection laws are quite strict. And yes, it's very strict. Lawful working hours are 40 hours per week. Lawfully firing a employee requires higher compensation than US. Do you really believe above is enforced in China? Next time when you visiting China, ask them if familiar with this quote: laws in China are strictly legislated, commonly broke, selectively enforced. In fact, 996 is a norm and a company that does not require 996 will advertise that when recruiting. Layoff compensation for many people is ZERO because they don't even have social insurance or contracts signed. 100 Chinese Yuan per day, you get it when working and get nothing when leaving. (That's not the case for Foxconn though. I believe everyone working in Foxconn at least has a contract.) > I just feel really bad for these people. They probably left some country side life making peanuts to go make some real money for a while at a factory and like send their kids to college or whatever - and now westerners are like "no, you shouldn't do that. go back to your bucolic life of poverty. And btw we hate your government". Cool Thanks, I appreciate that. I (the OP) am that kid though. And I believe getting involved in labor-intensive industries can be a better thing than what it is nowadays in China. I agree with the rest of your post. Like I mentioned, reasons of the protest are varied.
- throwawaaay129 4y ago
  I mean I lived a sheltered life in the city and my friends were city folks, but I often hear people had issues firing bad employees. And on the flip side people new their rights and knew they couldn't just be left off on a random day. Companies seemed always cautious with firing. Yeah there was tons of sneaky stuff and people not getting their contracts and lots of grey area stuff - maybe the enforcement wasn't great. But my point is that they actually have some mechanisms in place that do function when it's you vs a company (not you vs the government). So it's not fair to characterize the whole place as lawless In this case from the news it seemed to have worked out exactly as it should legally. Foxconn messed up (or tried to get sneaky with paying people), they got slapped on the wrist by the government, everyone got paid I hope their legal systems keep improving (it was way worse a decade or two ago) and less companies get away with screwing their employees. I'm skeptical other developing nations like India are on some other higher level with their legal systems. I think your original post is extremely sensationalist - comparing factory work to pseudoslave labor in cotton fields - especially given you're from a background that benefitted from this (I assume your parents worked when the system was much worse)
rwalle 4y ago
Born and raised in China, I stopped reading this after the first paragraph. Laws are meaningless if they are never enforced or are simply ignored. Which happens all the time in China. It is not easy to fire people. Sure, in normal situations. But when appropriate, government is going to ignore all these and do whatever necessary, and maybe even threaten to put you or your family in jail. Want to go to court? Good luck, the judges are going to stand with the government. Another example: the constitution says that Chinese people have the freedom to speak, publish and demonstrate etc. Tell me how that has worked out.
- yarky 4y ago
  > Born and raised in China. The OP made a good point that applies to all poor countries I've lived in: those jobs are the only (even the best) way out for most people to get out of poverty, which they do to help their families/children/themselves. Maybe you were raised in a family that did not need to go through such hard labor, but that doesn't mean your right in your view of your own world ;) P.S. I was also born and raised in a poor country.
  - netheril96 4y ago
    The point that “those jobs are the only (even the best) way out for most people to get out of poverty" stands. But the point that China has strict labor laws is laughable. The laws are indeed strict but seldom enforced.
    - yarky 4y ago
      > The laws are indeed strict but seldom enforced. This is true of most strict rules elsewhere: they're there but seldom enforced. Take speed limits, they're strict, but good luck enforcing them. All we do is we monitor from time to time and give tickets. Yet we could enforce this to the manufacturers, right? Why can a car go beyond the speed limit if it's strictly prohibited? We cannot compare working conditions as is, but they're easy to compare when you take time into account: how where our labor laws a couple of generations ago? Not that different than poor countries today.
hulitu 4y ago
> I don't know where people get the idea people are semi-enslaved in factories. Just normal propaganda.
90d 4y ago
I think it was the suicide nets?
jotm 4y ago
It can be a case of a factory running things like that. Pretty common in the US (with immigrants) and EU (again, immigrants). Except Chinese factories are huge and aplenty, so they would "win" by numbers.
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
powerapple 4y ago
My take is that most people use this as an excuse, no one cares about labors, if you really care about them, I would shift more jobs, they make enough money and leave factory, have a small business. I have relatives working in factories, it is the best thing happen to them. People are afraid to say 'fk China' blindly so they have to say it under disguise of some moral ground.

philliphaydon 4y ago

> Chinese worker protection laws are quite strict. The fact 996 is illegal and still practiced and complained about and censored… makes any existence of protection laws being strict null and void.

DocTomoe 4y ago
Who can honestly say they did not ever flaunt worktime laws (where they exist)? IT people do 60-80 hours, in the liberal-democratic country where there is a strict limit of 48 hours/week (and the average being around 39h). People wear that as a misplaced badge of honour - and often complain behind closed doors. Sounds similar.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I've been living in Asia for 11 or 12 years now. There is definitely a strange culture of over-working. Young people who live at home with their parents sometimes work late because they don't want to go home to their parents. Alot of other people work late because they want to get noticed for promotions etc. Some of it's self-inflicted. The first company I worked for in Singapore, the 'suits' as they are called (glorified sales people) would take requests from clients and commit at 6pm to deliverying the fixes by morning, then requesting the developers stay and do the work while they go home. So there are definitely, 100% scenarios where it's not the company itself directly demanding employees to doing insane hours. But it does happen, China requires non-overtime hours to be capped at 36 hours. People are often not compensated for any extra hours they do.
  - throwawaaay129 4y ago
    Yeah, I think it's a scenario where you can probably sue and you can probably win - but then (just like in the US) you're known as the person that sues their employer and it's a black mark. I haven't heard of people getting lawsuits about 996 thrown out in China - but to be fair I also haven't heard of people suing over that either.
    - fyresala 4y ago
      > but to be fair I also haven't heard of people suing over that either. Guess why
powerapple 4y ago
the labour law was mainly for factory workers, there overtime needs to be compensated. For office workers, it is not clearly defined, because typically you are evaluated by works done, not by time as factory workers.

ngcc_hk 4y ago

It is not the law or the occasional protection. It is when it is not working, the threat as experienced by local that is the issue. Not to mention the overall issue of human suppression. It is not helping by producing and buying china. Anyway, I think they moved is not because of this though. More because the unstable situation. And the invasion of Taiwan is inevitable. I will do it if I am in power. Not because I want to but I have to. That is the problem. And if that happened, what you do. Like German or EU on Russia oil. How many lesson you have to learn before you call yourselves …

pera 4y ago

Your experience seems very different from what several international human rights organisations have been reporting for the past two decades. I'd like to invite everyone here to follow for instance CLW: https://chinalaborwatch.org/ https://chinalaborwatch.org/

itsoktocry 4y ago
>I'd like to invite everyone here to follow for instance CLW Unfortunately, I think we're well past the days where you can simply say, "The WHO says..." or "the CDC says..." or "<some random NGO> says..." and expect anyone to believe it's some source of truth. As we speak, we're literally in the middle of multiple supposedly trustworthy institutions being exposed for bending the truth or creating a narrative for political reasons. There's a cold war with China in progress. In my country we're dealing with issues related to political influence by the Chinese. Even so, I'm trying to be careful that what I read isn't merely anti-Chinese propaganda, because I don't pretend we're not guilty of that ourselves.

hackernewds 4y ago

This reads oddly like propaganda and flies against any and all of the evidence that we regularly observe, including the protests against working conditions that we are observing now

mikymoothrowa 4y ago
China does have some of the best worker protection laws. The protests we’re observing now, including the one in the iphone city, are against the government. Let’s not conflate the two.
- rwalle 4y ago
  Wow, "are against the government", that's really some typical CCP talk seen in their smear campaign. From what I can see people just want a bit of freedom and get their promised compensation. I doubt any of the workers has interest in overthrowing the government.
  - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
    I'm not sure where you're from but for a good majority of the world, protesting against the government and wanting to overthrow the government are two very different things. I am talking about the former. The sorry state the west has devolved into in the last 2 years.
- woooooo 4y ago
  There was a different protest at a factory in shenzhen, prior to the lockdown protests.
itsoktocry 4y ago
>This reads oddly like propaganda and flies against any and all of the evidence that we regularly observe What evidence are you observing that has convinced you it's one way or the other? I can go on Twitter and see some variant of the first comment and the second in almost every thread. What are you reading that you consider the "ground truth" that you can so easily point out the propaganda? As a Canadian, I'm sure my sources are similar to yours, and I'm not really sure what the truth is. I assume it's somewhere in the middle. One thing I do know is that both "sides" are churning out propaganda at an unprecedented pace.

fyresala 4y ago

Your views of labor law are completely wrong. > in my second hand experience Chinese worker protection laws are quite strict. And yes, it's very strict. Lawful working hours are 40 hours per week. Lawfully firing a employee requires higher compensation than US. Do you really believe above is enforced in China? Next time when you visiting China, ask them if familiar with this quote: laws in China are strictly legislated, commonly broke, selectively enforced. In fact, 996 is a norm and a company that does not require 996 will advertise that when recruiting. Layoff compensation for many people is ZERO because they don't even have social insurance or contracts signed. 100 Chinese Yuan per day, you get it when working and get nothing when leaving. (That's not the case for Foxconn though. I believe everyone working in Foxconn at least has a contract.) > I just feel really bad for these people. They probably left some country side life making peanuts to go make some real money for a while at a factory and like send their kids to college or whatever - and now westerners are like "no, you shouldn't do that. go back to your bucolic life of poverty. And btw we hate your government". Cool Thanks, I appreciate that. I (the OP) am that kid though. And I believe getting involved in labor-intensive industries can be a better thing than what it is nowadays in China. I agree with the rest of your post. Like I mentioned, reasons of the protest are varied.

throwawaaay129 4y ago
I mean I lived a sheltered life in the city and my friends were city folks, but I often hear people had issues firing bad employees. And on the flip side people new their rights and knew they couldn't just be left off on a random day. Companies seemed always cautious with firing. Yeah there was tons of sneaky stuff and people not getting their contracts and lots of grey area stuff - maybe the enforcement wasn't great. But my point is that they actually have some mechanisms in place that do function when it's you vs a company (not you vs the government). So it's not fair to characterize the whole place as lawless In this case from the news it seemed to have worked out exactly as it should legally. Foxconn messed up (or tried to get sneaky with paying people), they got slapped on the wrist by the government, everyone got paid I hope their legal systems keep improving (it was way worse a decade or two ago) and less companies get away with screwing their employees. I'm skeptical other developing nations like India are on some other higher level with their legal systems. I think your original post is extremely sensationalist - comparing factory work to pseudoslave labor in cotton fields - especially given you're from a background that benefitted from this (I assume your parents worked when the system was much worse)

rwalle 4y ago

Born and raised in China, I stopped reading this after the first paragraph. Laws are meaningless if they are never enforced or are simply ignored. Which happens all the time in China. It is not easy to fire people. Sure, in normal situations. But when appropriate, government is going to ignore all these and do whatever necessary, and maybe even threaten to put you or your family in jail. Want to go to court? Good luck, the judges are going to stand with the government. Another example: the constitution says that Chinese people have the freedom to speak, publish and demonstrate etc. Tell me how that has worked out.

yarky 4y ago
> Born and raised in China. The OP made a good point that applies to all poor countries I've lived in: those jobs are the only (even the best) way out for most people to get out of poverty, which they do to help their families/children/themselves. Maybe you were raised in a family that did not need to go through such hard labor, but that doesn't mean your right in your view of your own world ;) P.S. I was also born and raised in a poor country.
- netheril96 4y ago
  The point that “those jobs are the only (even the best) way out for most people to get out of poverty" stands. But the point that China has strict labor laws is laughable. The laws are indeed strict but seldom enforced.
  - yarky 4y ago
    > The laws are indeed strict but seldom enforced. This is true of most strict rules elsewhere: they're there but seldom enforced. Take speed limits, they're strict, but good luck enforcing them. All we do is we monitor from time to time and give tickets. Yet we could enforce this to the manufacturers, right? Why can a car go beyond the speed limit if it's strictly prohibited? We cannot compare working conditions as is, but they're easy to compare when you take time into account: how where our labor laws a couple of generations ago? Not that different than poor countries today.

hulitu 4y ago

> I don't know where people get the idea people are semi-enslaved in factories. Just normal propaganda.

90d 4y ago

I think it was the suicide nets?

jotm 4y ago

It can be a case of a factory running things like that. Pretty common in the US (with immigrants) and EU (again, immigrants). Except Chinese factories are huge and aplenty, so they would "win" by numbers.

onetokeoverthe 4y ago

powerapple 4y ago

My take is that most people use this as an excuse, no one cares about labors, if you really care about them, I would shift more jobs, they make enough money and leave factory, have a small business. I have relatives working in factories, it is the best thing happen to them. People are afraid to say 'fk China' blindly so they have to say it under disguise of some moral ground.