Very good comment. They are better off with these jobs than without them. Still, they should have some basic working conditions. Such as max 45hrs a week. 2 week vacation a year, etc.
Right, because working more than 45 hours a week is a crime against humanity and here in the civilized West nobody ever works more than that rollseyes
I have a cushy office job but the friends from my adolescent years are now mostly blue collar.workers. Those who have their own businesses (one-man shops: plumbing, construction contractors, painters, those type of jobs) work 50 to 60 hours a week, plus client meetings and paperwork in the evenings and on Sundays. Those who work in factories work regular weeks of 40 hours and they put "Yay! I'm getting overtime!" statuses on their facebook pages when they get to work another 10 or so hours, either during the week (evenings) or on Saturdays. Of course sometimes they complain too when their boss asks them to work on the day after a big soccer game or whatever and when they had rather slept in, but in general the overtime is what makes the pay quite good - so it is mostly considered a perk to get to work overtime.
When I was in highschool, my summer job was as a lifeguard. My coworkers would fight for overtime because the time-and-a-half was a good perk. This included both teenagers who need no job and adults who worked for a living. This is in the United States. Granted lifeguarding is a rather easy job, but laws against overtime are silly.
These people are working 15 hour shifts and they work 6.25 days a week. That means they are working over 90 hours a week; every week. I can't believe you actually compare that with the conditions in the west. The marginal cost for the employee of each additional hour is huge. Big difference between working 40 hours with frequent overtime and 90 hours a week.
Hey, you are the one proposing a limit of 45 hours - which is HALF of what you cite here, and which would take away the fat from many people's incomes not only in China but in Europe & the US as well. I guess that the next thing you're going to say will be that the limit should be at 50 or 60 or 70 or whatever - I say, let people make their own damn choices. If these people are being whipped into working 90 hours weeks, I'd be all against it; in fact I think that a democratic regime overthrowing a dictatorship that oppresses its citizens like that is morally perfectly fine. But as long as nobody is made to do anything, I don't see the problem. In fact if you give this guy the choice between working 90 hours in a factory for a few years and subsistance farming for the same amount of time and still being afraid that you'll starve because of a drought, too much rain, locust plague or whatever, he wouldn't have to think too hard or long.
The Chinese government has three (approximately) week long holiday periods around the lunar new year, labor day, and national day. For factories like the one described in the article, they can expect up to about 30% of their workers to leave on vacation and not come back.
I'm sure I've read that the 40 hour week was created because someone did some measurements and realized that if you worked people for longer than that on a regular basis, then they got tired and started messing up. That is, the limit is for the benefit of the business, not the employee.
