Foxconn is not in the US, so compare the working conditions to something more appropriate!

Posted by SunnyDee on April 14, 2012 03:38 pm 6

I lived in China for 2 years and it annoys me, that the media always overlooks one really important fact when reporting on the living conditions of Foxconn workers in China. They should give a comparison with other people that live there!
For example: university students in China live in the same style dorms as are described in many of the articles, 6-8 students a room in bunk beds, bathrooms for the whole floor, and for students the dorm building doors are locked at 10pm and you have to find some other place to sleep if you are ever late (and that's for the biggest and best universities in Beijing, I don't even want to know about the rest of China..).

Some more facts:
McDonalds has over 40 restaurants, or whatever you'd call that, in Beijing alone.. They pay their workers less than minimum wage (almost a quarter of what Foxconn workers earn).. Same for KFC!

Btw, you can buy a meal with meat in a restaurant, in Beijing for as little as 25cents. My favorite dish at a little restaurant close to my uni cost me 1€ (It's called gongbao jiding and is at least one whole chicken breast in cubes, some veggies, peanuts, an amazing sauce, and rice of course. The American version is probably Kong Pow chicken, but the taste, I'm sad to say, is quite different..), and you got as much free green tea with that as you could drink.

You can get an apartment in Beijing for less than €100 a month, I paid about €200 for mine with 2 bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, fully furnished with beds, couches, tv and everything you need (this would usually probably be good for a chinese family of 4-7 people) in an area of BJ that's more expensive due to lots of foreign students living there.. If I would eat my favorite dish 3 times a day, 30 days a month, I would still pay less than what a single Foxconn worker makes in a month before overtime. But they only pay $17 a month for the dorm and $2 a day for food, so they make over $300 a month before overtime! You can live off that for quite some time in China!

So, in conclusion, Foxconn workers don't have to live in those dorms, or eat at Foxconn either, but it's cheaper, so most opt to do so. They live no worse than millions of students all over China, probably better than many of them! Certainly better than millions of country folks who go to the big cities to find work, or people in the cities who are either too uneducated or educated in the wrong field, to find a decent job, not to speak of all the farmers, who often still do all their work by hand or with primitive tools we abandoned some time a few centuries ago..

How can the media compare living conditions at Foxconn with those in the US? They could go to Germany and compare a top manager salary with that in the US.. BMW CEO Norbert Reithofer earned €2.3 million in 2008 (just the first thing I could find with a quick google search..).. OMG! That's no way to live! He is obviously one of the big earners in Germany, but in the US there are at least 50 CEOs that earn 10-40+ times that.. Not to speak of the 300,000 Americans who earn an average of $5.6 million a year.. (According to a trustworthy German publication http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/0,1518,474681,00.html )

What I'm trying to say is, you can't always compare what's normal in the US with things that happen on the other side of the world.. It's like comparing apples to bananas.. And that's especially true, if you only know part of the story!