Creative Synthesis

perusing the suppliers of the laptop i write these posts on, i came across a supplier to lenovo (as well as acer, dell, fujitsu, motorola, nec, samsung, and siemens) that was investigated by the hong kong students and scholars against corporate misbehavior for labor violations. their report on factories in shenzhen single out one taiwanese-owned factory, shenzhen yonghong factory for the most violations, including child labor, excessive overtime, pay below the legal minimum, lack of social insurance and occupational health risks. from the report:

“Yonghong was found to be hiring more than 200 child workers under the age of 16, mainly students seeking summer jobs. Out of the 25 workers whom SACOM interviewed, 7 were child workers. Many child workers were students from rural Henan and Shaanxi provinces. They were brought by their teachers to work in Yonghong, partly to pay off the school fees they owed. Since they were considered ‘unskilled’, the factory required them to work an extra 1.5 hours per day without pay to compensate for the ‘lower than normal productivity’. Normally, child and student workers worked 13 hours per day or 390 hours per month. During peak seasons, they worked more than 400 hours and 60 of those hours were without pay.”

“The legal minimum for overtime pay is 6 and 8 yuan [78 cents and $1.04] per hour respectively for normal days and holidays. Yonghong currently was found to be paying 4.5 and 5.8 yuan [59 and 75 cents] respectively.”

“Adult workers at Yonghong worked 296 hours per month during low season and 374 hours during peak season, which were both way beyond the legal maximum of 196 hours per month.”

the report names the fsp group as the owner of this factory, which mainly produces computer power supplies. it also cites a number of other factories for other violations, including suppliers for apple, canon, compaq, ibm, nortel, sony, toshiba, nokia, hp, philips, sharp and lg.

one reason i bring up this article is that i have been researching the consumer electronics supply chain, which is largely unregulated and untraceable beyond primary suppliers because of long-standing personal- and family-based supplier relationships in china. in take note: laptop supply chain is not what you’d expect there is a near total lack of end-to-end accountability for the producers of the parts that end up in brand-name consumer electronics. another is that the fsp group was kind enough to post a public video which shows none of their manufacturing sites (above). i wonder how long they will keep my comment on their video - it’s the only one there so far.