In 2011, China’s Factories Still Rife With Abuses and Awful Conditions [REPORT]

China Labour Watch (CLW), the not-for-profit organization that has monitored working conditions in China’s factories since 2000, has just published its 2011 report on the persistent abuses at ten hi-tech manufacturing plants across that country. The factories produce gadgets for HP, Dell, Nokia, Motorola, MSI, Asus, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, and many other well-known brands.

By interviewing dozens of workers at each of the ten factories – spread across China’s two main industrial hubs in Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces – CLW got a clear picture of improving or deteriorating conditions, as well as seeing patterns of abuses and dishonorable behavior by management that’s designed to wring every last cent from workers.

There’s such a litany of penny-pinching, conniving, greedy, amoral inhumanity on display at these factories – at many, for example, a worker being just one minute late for a shift will result in them being docked a half day of wages, in addition to a further monetary fine – that the minutiae of corporate callousness takes on a systematic and almost torture-like relentlessness.

Some of the major name brands whose products are manufactured at these 10 factories.

Most depressingly, there’s no area of major improvement over the arc of the past few years, not even with tightened labor laws in China, or supposed Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaigns by Microsoft or Apple. Indeed, the five main types of violations according to CLW – “overtime, wages, labor intensity, contracts, and discrimination” – are all in grim evidence in this year’s report.

As someone who has followed these reports over recent years, it’s alarming to see specific violations crop up again this year, such as:

Forcing workers to work overtime; arbitrarily fining workers; discriminating against workers on the basis of their gender, age, and status as Hepatitis B carriers; adopting methods of production that required high levels of labor intensity; and, finally, using militant management strategies.

The worst plant proved to be that of Hongkai Electronics, based in Dongguan in southern China, which makes precision instruments and various cables for IBM, ASUS, Konka, Apple, HP and some others. Almost all of its CLW scores (as seen in the interactive graph, below) were so low that they approached being the worst in the industry. CLW observed that “monthly overtime exceeds 142 hours,” there were no sick days offered, workers often had no time to use the bathroom during a shift, the workshops were filthy and not regularly cleaned, the lighting was insufficient, and… Well, it goes on and on. If you’re having a bad day at work, you can now be thankful you don’t work at Hongkai.

One tiny sliver of good news is that Foxconn – which manufactures a great deal of Apple’s products, and has been under the most global scrutiny in recent years – has shown improvements, and one of its two investigated plants emerged from this report as the top facility. But CRW warns:

When Foxconn came under intense international scrutiny, its competitors, Flextronics, BYD, ASUS, Quanta and other supplier factories, benefited. If under public scrutiny and criticism, Foxconn improves the labor conditions inside its factories, but brand companies are unwilling to increase their order prices, these labor reforms will not be sustainable. In this situation, buyer brand companies will inconspicuously place their orders with other factories that are not under such intense public scrutiny.

CLW also graded the ten OEM firms according to various working condition factors, with a score of 1 representing the worst such conditions in the industry, and a score of 5 being the best. Instead of showing you their table, we made this interactive graph instead: