The $205.4B Gulag
gouldasks.substack.comI have a fairly unusual history relative to my general cohort in that between high school and college, I spent about two years working in electronics manufacturing and assembly factories (age 17 to 19) in California. I did work like injection-molding cases for devices, cutting cable and crimping connectors for computer cables, and finally, a bit of work in a laser-welding facility for precision components in Silicon Valley. The pay was remarkably good for someone my age with nothing but a high-school education, particularly when production ramped up and overtime was available (I could afford my own small apartment, and bought a car), but eventually the tedium convinced me to go to college (plus, the people upstairs in the R&D division had better pay and more interesting jobs).
Some of those jobs still exist but most of that work has been outsourced to China and Mexico and Indonesia and the Philippines. There seem to be a fair amount of high-end prototyping shops but very little mass production activity, particularly of the basic components that go into tech devices. That's because:
> ""PCB [printed circuit board] manufacturing and assembly is a very low-margin business and is largely located in Asia. It comes down to access to low-cost labor, a vast ecosystem of factory infrastructure, and flexibility. It is hard to replicate the ecosystem in the US today," said Kundojjala. "
https://www.pcmag.com/news/silicon-usa-technology-made-in-am...
The primary reason Apple and others pushed for oversea production via NAFTA trade deals, WTO membership for China, etc. is to cut labor costs. Paying kids with high-school education relatively high wages was seen as too onerous, so the factories were shipped overseas. While I worked in electronics, this exact same thing happened with the similarly-sized garment manufactuing industry.
Now if you're wondering why there's an epidemic of homelessness and poverty in California, and it's become the state with the largest income gap in the USA, well, that's why.
>> ""PCB [printed circuit board] manufacturing and assembly is a very low-margin business and is largely located in Asia. It comes down to access to low-cost labor, a vast ecosystem of factory infrastructure, and flexibility. It is hard to replicate the ecosystem in the US today," said Kundojjala. "
I have a section in The Big Bucks about "PCB manufacture": it used to be [1970's] outsourced on a piecework basis to people in my neighborhood [SV] who did it in their garages. Some of the very old timers around here still remember it. It was before my time.
The electronics companies would deliver the boards & the parts, and the neighbors would stuff them. One of those companies was Apple, I believe.
If you were really good they might have you solder.
> Now if you're wondering why there's an epidemic of homelessness and poverty in California, and it's become the state with the largest income gap in the USA, well, that's why.
Because companies moved low skill labor elsewhere because it is cheaper there?
As you move up the manufacturing ladder, skill levels rise fairly quickly - and many college graduates would struggle with these jobs, without undergoing a fair amount of training. Laser welding is fairly high-skill - a mixed combination of laser types, gas feeds, high-voltage equipment, compatibility issues with different laser types and materials, etc. Likewise, auto assembly and steel production are fairly high-skill jobs.
Even the developer world has seen this trend - why pay US wages to developers if you can get the same labor at one-fifth the price in India?
The result of course is the minting of more American billionaires, the conversion of domestic property markets into gambling casinos and rental emporiums, and most troublingly, the loss of much technological know-how to other countries. Radio Shack used to provide electronics hobbyists, whose day jobs were simple electronics assembly, with products; that ended and they tried to become a retailer of Chinese-made products before going out of business.
It's basically the story of the greedy investor class who killed the goose that laid their golden eggs.
I am making a concerted effort in my life to avoid buying things made in China. It’s harder than it sounds, and in the case of consumer electronics, impossible. If the point of this article is to make the reader feel bad for buying an iPhone, they’ve failed. Nearly every electronics device sold in the US is made or assembled in China, and most under even worse conditions than FoxConn.
> If the point of this article is to make the reader feel bad for buying an iPhone, they’ve failed. Nearly every electronics device sold in the US is made or assembled in China
I would still say it's good to call attention to the problem even if there's no real solution for consumers.
Well, customers actually can buy less stuff and replace current technologic devices at a slower pace.
Unfortunately cheap lithium ion batteries literally carry an expiration date. Few years and you operate on fraction of capacity and it's getting ever harder to replace the cells.
The best you can do, I think, is to make sure to support Taiwanese brands as much as possible, as opposed to direct Chinese brands. Asus, Acer, Gigabyte are a few of them. Yes, they're still quite intermingled with the mainland, but it's better than nothing!
It's been "fun" to see tankie twitter rush to point out that Foxconn is a Taiwanese company (not a Chinese one), after years of denying that Taiwan is separate from China:
https://i.ibb.co/TqdYf4y/image.png
My new Mac Studo was made in Malaysia, and the computer I bought before, a Gigabyte Aorus 17G, in Taiwan. The workers at this factory rioted because they had been held there against their will due to a Covid lockdown, as opposed to the more usual being locked out of your workplace and livelihood. Ironically Xi Jinping’s inflexible zero-Covid policy is making the Chinese supply chain unreliable and doing what no amount of human-rights abuse or US government pressure could do, forcing Apple to move production out of China to places like Vietnam and India.
> The workers at this factory rioted because they had been held there against their will due to a Covid lockdown
Literally the opposite.
Foxconn was trying to kick workers OUT of factory which had to shutter due to covid - the riot was over lack of compensation + bonuses. Which is about Foxconn who is infamous for mistreating workers in plants across east Asia, hence Apple doing +1 shift with Foxconn doesn't change anything, see Indian plant riotting over similar issue. Mac Studio still assembled by Foxconn. Root of problem is TW business culture, the shit practices in PRC are learned from OG TW base manufacturers who hasn't changed much, Gigabyte isn't spared.
>assembled in China, and most under even worse conditions than FoxConn
Citation needed. There's a reason Honhai / Foxconn / TW businesses have decades old bad rep in East Asia, in terms of working conditions, mistreating workers, withholding compensation and passports. Much of the China-bad meme of rampant gulag capitalism applies and were imported from TW by TW business culture (granted at invitation of PRC), from gutteroil to tofu construction, distant fishing slavery etc. Poor TW workers rights get exported abroad (i.e. Indian plant) where they're generally invited and hence have leverage to mistreat. If anything, from my experience, working conditions in PRC manufacturing sectors comparable to Foxconn are now generally better, more abide by rights and laws simply because PRC nationals can be easily held accountable vs. Foxconn getting immunity from local gov due to cross strait cooperation perks, or whatever regional equivalent to draw Foxconn investment. Labour issue will persist regardless of where you buy from, because likely you'll still be buying from the same global manufacturing company known for not having scruples.
Who decides to make it in China? Who demands that companies be highly highly profitable?
Profitable companies outcompete less competitive ones.
No one decided that, it's just a fact.
Actually, a company that accrues a lot of profit could always be outcompeted by one willing to make less profits. Profit is a cost to the company itself, it is only beneficial to shareholders.
On the other hand, it's true that companies with lower costs will tend to outcompete others, so moving to China is sort of dictated by the market.
To a point. You cannot go lower than base cost, and can be made irrelevant by sheer volume.
What is decided are the rules of the game, the outcome is then somewhat obvious.
> Due to the fatal flaw I mentioned above, I’ve always thought that the factories that build these tools/toys must be fascinating places that take materials, humans and magic in and push amazement out. Giant robotic arms moving around in a never-ending sync, working their magic, in harmony, producing our toys.
Yeah, "magic".
Eh, it’s substack. Not expecting much.
I'd like to remind people about the terrible working conditions in extremely wealthy places such as California too. Right now, University of California grad students and researchers, who produce a massive proportion of science on the West coast, are on strike. In most locations, it's nearly impossible to pay rent on their stipends. Grad students may be in training, but they are also the source of nearly all the novel ideas and the analysis and the basic work that goes into moving science forward. Principal Investigators these days write grants, and perhaps collaborate on the ideas and analysis, but in nearly every major paper I have seen come from a lab where I know the people well, it's the grad students at the heart of the intellectual work.
This inability to pay rent isn't as much because wages got lowered, it's mostly because certain cities decided that they didn't want any more housing, in order to appease land owners and drive up housing prices to astronomical levels. But it's also unethical to pay somebody for a job if they can't use those wages to live.
Fortunately I'm not aware of any police violence against the grad students yet, but there has been plenty of UC police violence in the past against striking workers.
This is not an identical situation to the delayed bonuses discussed in the article. But as tech heavy as HN we may not be as in touch with a workforces that get squeezed on basic ability to survive, such as assembly in China or grad students in California. (Or dare I mention the farm workers that put all the food on our table...)
“This is not an identical situation to the delayed bonuses discussed in the article.”
Not even close my friend. I would trust that instinct. People working 6-7 days a week, doing labor, in a factory, in shit conditions. Desperately clinging to each paycheck that comes along.
Vs academic bureaucrats in one of the most Labor sensitive institutions in the world, who can’t afford the Bay Area…? The most expensive region of the US to live in. Not. Even. Close. Just a reminder, employees at UC Berkeley are entitled to a pension after five years.
Police violence against UC Berkeley staff? Seems highly doubtful.
As far as not being able to afford rent in the Bay Area, hard to disagree, that is a real problem that impacts quality of lives in a very negative way. Hopefully, with all the brain power at Berkeley, people begin to more honestly and openly contemplate the actual source and solution to this deep problem in the Bay Area’s housing supply not quite matching demands of UC Berkeley staff. Asking bold questions for a campus like Berkeley like.. what policies and stubborn attachment to specific world views might be contributing to the constriction of such supply and demand conditions?
> Not even close my friend. I would trust that instinct.
Not sure what instinct you are referring to here. And just a reminder that when there's a strike, the people who go out to support are those with the least pay, or those who are already in unions. Trying to split grad students off from the rest of the labor force is not something that I am trying to do, if that's what you are implying.
> Just a reminder, employees at UC Berkeley are entitled to a pension after five years.
This is false, grad students never earn a pension. Grad student researchers are who I'm talking about, the people who are currently on strike.
Even still, what good is a pension if you can't pay rent today?
I bring up grad student workers both because they are currently striking, but also because HN readers are probably more familiar with them, and can commiserate a bit more. It's not work that is as hard on the body as farm work, but desperately needing each paycheck in order to get enough food to eat, in order to pay rent and not end up homeless, living in terrible filthy conditions such as homes with mold, or in in insulated garages, or in sheds behind a primary house, with shared use of the kitchen and bathroom... those sorts of poor living conditions, barely able to be paid for are common.
Let me ask you an honest question.
If you had to wake up tomorrow, as either a foxconn iPhone factory worker, or a Berkeley graduate student, which would you pick? How different do you think those experiences are?
You don’t have that option, because manufacturing and other roles was shipped to China.
That’s the leverage.
Almost of third of workers are on disability, another third have minimum wage jobs and the rest have prospects. The business model in college is taking advantage of pride of tenured professors who don’t want to teach and pushing adjunct and temporary faculty.
A lot of people don’t get it and get stuck in the academic funnel. That Berkeley grad student isn’t breaking her body, but is sacrificing core working years, mostly to support the $$ faculty and administration.
Long term, especially in humanities, you won’t have tenured professors, just some assistant professors on two year contracts grinding a meager living along with with sucker grad students who either don’t get it or need the work to keep a visa.
foxconn workers have jobs... try south sudan and living in a slum that was built because the people around you want to kill you.
Comparing factory workers anywhere to grad students in California is remarkable. Grad students endure the conditions voluntarily. They would have tons of alternative options in the private sector if they chose to do that.
The difference of extremity does not make comparison unreasonable.
Exploitation of workers is at the core of both circumstances. Downplaying/ignoring one set of circumstances because it is lesser on the scale of abuse is the more remarkable point of view, in my opinion.
Perhaps grad student workers should just struggle in silence, due to the difference in their circumstances with other workers. Or perhaps all workers should band together in solidarity due to the commonality of their circumstances.
No, they should just quit if they don’t like it. The reason they don’t is that they are getting extra compensation in the form of status and credential they are working towards, or legal immigration status for many foreign students. It is silly to ignore these and focus exclusively on financial compensation.
As a thought experiment: imagine that these grad students were offered a deal, where their pay is doubled, their job responsibilities are unchanged, but they are removed from the students roll, no longer can qualify for PhD degree (though they can still and in fact are expected to publish just as much as before), and their job title is now “lab technician” instead of “graduate students”. How many of them do you think would have taken the deal? My belief is that basically none of them would consider double the pay to be worth it.
So your position is that they should quit instead of negotiate for better conditions? Who is that better for and why? You don't provide any argument for why that's a better course of action for anybody.
As somebody who benefits, indirectly, from their work, since their work benefits all of society, I'm much happier with them improving the working conditions and continuing to work, rather than quitting and losing that investment in their specialized knowledge.
No, my position is that their situation is not so terrible as claimed by the people who compare the grad students to low paid workers in retail or manufacturing. They are compensated highly in non-financial terms.
More importantly, the main reason people negotiate with one another is that they hope to achieve better outcomes than they can with either a default of no action, or unilateral actions. Imagine that the grad students sit down to the negotiating table with the people determining they pay. They ask for higher pay, and the other side says straight up “no”, and offers no concession whatsoever. What then? At this point, the only option available to the students is threatening some form of quitting, as they don’t really have any other means of leverage.
The point here is that even if they do negotiate, they must be ready and willing to quit if they want these negotiations to go their way, and if they aren’t (and they very much aren’t, as people who are willing to quit grad school simply do exactly that), they’ll keep making a pittance in terms of cash benefits.
Oh, they can do far more than just quit. The threat of a strike is one of explicit disruption of work and distribution of products.
Potentially even including violence against strikebreakers.
There can be other threats against people responsible for salaries and work conditions directly.
We are talking about grad students here, in case you missed that.
They have skin in the game in terms of their education. Walking away will impact references as well.
The nihilist attitude towards human decency at work in the tech industry is so gross. As someone outside looking in, as tech plateaus and consolidates, it will be amusing to observe this flip. All of the former FAANG people will be crying the same way the IBM, DEC, HP hotshots of yesteryear did.
The circumstances have little in common. Grad students are cognitive elites who put up with poor working conditions on a temporary basis en route to high status positions. They are like medical residents or overworked junior professionals in law, banking, journalism, media, etc.
You can’t have meaningful solidarity between people who aren’t similarly situated, and who have differing incentives.
So graduate education should only be available to the children of the wealthy, in your opinion?
I think graduate students are aspiring members of the petit bourgeoise, and typically are going to come from such families anyway, and shouldn’t dilute real workers’ movements with their quite distinct interests.
So, workers' movements don't benefit from their members going to graduate school?
Perhaps you have identified graduate school students as aspiring members of the petit bourgeoise because only individuals with such aspirations would rationally pay for graduate school in today's system.
I don't think anyone is discounting the problem -- but they are reacting to the scale. Its like you jumped onto a story about a child stepping on a landmine to complain about your paper cut.
Defending paying people less than a living wage is remarkable. There are an endless number of contrarian positions to take, but 'scientists shouldn't protest being paid too little to live on' takes the cake. Incidentally having worked both in a factory role and as a graduate student - the former was significantly better paid.
There may be issues on both fronts but yeah, scale does matter -- there is a difference between someone that is basically an indentured (and locked up at night) servant and a grad student that is doing research that is not making comfortable wage in a high COL area.
Ok then list just 5 options they have from the tons you claim exist. Go ahead, no hurry.
Please make sure to provide factual options that can be corroborated.
My friend just got a job as a delivery truck driver here in WA. Works 4 days a week, from 4 AM to 2 PM, and makes north of $100k. He tells me that the trucking companies are hiring like crazy. Do you think this is beyond the abilities of grad students?
Wow. Does their job require a CDL?
Yes, but if grad students are good at anything at all, passing exams is one of those things.
Just to clarify, your position is that, without "corroborated" proof to the contrary, you doubt that there are 5 jobs that a graduate student can get with better pay and conditions than a worker in one of these factories?
It’s unfortunate you’re catching heat for this 1000% true comment.
The reality is that Apple systematically robs value, specifically the value delivered by foreign slave labor. This same process occurs in graduate schools across the United States. Universities rob graduate students of the value they deliver to higher education. It’s just done in a white-collar patina with lies instead of force.
The “oh they’re in training” is nonsense. They will not obtain even an adjunct position after a PhD. It would be one thing to have a true apprenticeship with a guaranteed job, but that isn’t how this scam works.
It is all grist for the mill.
Is this heat? The opposition seems very minor, IMHO! After years of fighting for more housing in California my skin has thickened. If I'm not slandered with five different slurs and and accused of at least four different blatant lies delivered with utmost confidence, then it's a friendly conversation IMHO.
What kind of standards are we talking? Can't afford 25th percentile studio apartment in the region? Can't rent and walk to work?
They go without food, and double up and triple up in rooms that they rent. And though homelessness is more prevalent among undergrad students, it also happens to a lot of grad student workers too.
But I'm curious if that is a self imposed condition because they simply can't rent exactly where they want to.
As an example, there was a googler famously living out of a moving truck, because he wanted a short commute and couldn't live right next to the campus in MTV. That was his choice, I don't think anyone would argue google doesn't pay people enough to afford rent.
How many hours of commuting a day amounts to living "exactly where you want to"?
If you can save $1000/month in rent by adding 200 hours of commute, why is that OK? And once you add in the extra thousands of miles of car travel, and having to pay for a car rather than being able to bike or take a bus, and it doesn't actually save any money...
Here are the estimated costs of living for various campuses, by three different methodologies:
https://twitter.com/weinberz/status/1596299620266962944?s=46...
The highest cost of living is where there's no escape to cheap housing by adding long commutes.
The people running these towns with high cost of living could add plenty of more housing, enough to reduce the cost of living, but have been spoiled brats about it. The level of entitlement among homeowners about not even seeing an apartment is absolutely astounding.
Can you point to statistics of homelessness and food scarcity amongst university students in California?
I would be surprised if it is more than a rounding error, but open to being shocked.
5%-20% of college students were homeless at the time of this study [0] (closer to 5-10 for universities).
[0] https://oshi-la.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/cts-state-of-...
Figure 1 here from the state:
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4014
Homelessness is far higher than a rounding error, it's 5% of UC students, 10% of CSU students, and 20% of community college students.
I live in a town with a UC campus, and come across packs of students living in their cars. They do everything they can to have minimal impact and hide from view. It makes me terribly sad, and shocked every time I see it.
I also found this article: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/18/california-univers...
Hey, that's where I live! Locally, the degrowth community from the 70s has allied with more conservative locals to stop all housing and maintain a firmly anti-university stance that prevents the building of dorms, of housing, and even results in ridiculous stances like trying to cut down on bus service since students use the buses a lot (and therefore cut down on traffic a lot).
I fight as hard as I can against the people causing all the suffering amongst those who aren't super wealthy, but their ability to understand other humans can not see beyond the comfort of their own yards. In contrast, they complain viciously about a building that they can see. A very strange sort of sight.
https://www.ucop.edu/global-food-initiative/_files/food-hous...
A 2017 study found:
- 5% of UC Graduate students had experienced homelessness.
- 26% of UC Graduate students had experienced food insecurity.
I guess for me the takeaway is:
Buy fewer electronics
That's is extremely unpopular with the general public, much less here on HN.
Ask people to reduce their consumption and they have a tendency to lash out.
Why is that? I've noticed that nearly all of these new toys don't improve my quality of life. Do people buy things as a dopamine hit and form of escapism? It certainly seems that way.
Yes, that's exactly what it is. We live in a society where happiness is just an amazon box away. It doesn't last long, but with overnight shipping people don't need it to.
Almost every ad you see is trying to tell people how much better their life will be with a product and how much happier they'll be.
Especially if it concerns meat!
Buy less, period.
It would be nice to see an article that bothered to explain the situation instead of an easy outrage piece.
Engagement with China has gone very, very bad with Xi Jinping’s regime. He is absolutely the root of the problem and is doubling down in a bid to become Mao 2.
I switched to iphone from android very recently and I do feel bad about it.
Almost all consumer electronics are made at these Chinese manufacturers. Only the high-end chips are from Taiwan, South Korea, or Arizona.
I'm software engineer at a Danish company that also manufactures a lot of industrial electronics. Our insight is that China is still the cheapest place to manufacture PCBs but it is surprisingly more efficient to setup pick-and-place robots here in Denmark to place the components onto the PCBs. The pick-and-place machines and assembly robots run all night now.
If we can figure out how to efficiently print the PCBs in Denmark/EU we will no longer have any critical reliance on China.
> If we can figure out how to efficiently print the PCBs in Denmark/EU
see my other post. It used to be part of a garage-shop economy here in Silicon Valley.
Modern pcbs cannot be compared to garage shop pcbs. No one in a garage is going to be making me blind/buried/stacked micro vias, controlled impedance traces, exotic substrates etc. there are a handful of proto shops in the USA that can do it but the vast vast majority is in china. For large scale pcbs needed for consumer electronics I’m not sure any domestic supplier could meet the demand. I don’t know the situation in EU but it’s probably similar. Don’t even get me started on flex pcb vendors…
that was kinda tongue-in-cheek.
Back when you could do it in garages, things were a little simpler.
Almost all is not all right?
Most Androids are included in the almost all, even if the chips are made in fabs in Taiwan so many other components have Chinese sourcing
It's pretty safe to rest assured that the cheaper the device (or piece of clothing or mostly any consumer good) you're buying, the more shoddy the kitchen side of it is.
Sure, a small but growing percentage of iPhones are assembled in India, sure. Some other manufacturers will be doing the same.
Apple is moving their iPhone production to India, so you supported that in some way, perhaps.
Dunno if their factories will be any less gulags, but given what kind of a place China is, perhaps they are.
This video gives a pretty comprehensive idea how a smartphone is constructed.
I absolutely believe we should strive to improve the lives of all living beings in the world. But purely to provide an alternative perspective and spark some lively conversation, I want to explore a different point of view:
No one is forcing these workers in China to take these jobs. The workers willingly choose to take them because they are an improvement over their status quo. The jobs pay more, and offer better benefits for them and their families, than they may be able to obtain elsewhere.
That's one of the great benefits of globalization. A factory job manufacturing cell phones may offer substandard wages in the US, but it's a big step forward for workers in a developing country. In this way both countries benefit.
Obviously everyone wants to continue to improve their lot, and a Chinese worker may BOTH realize that their factory job is better than they can attain elsewhere, AND they may suffer under poor conditions at that job. But they can always quit, and odds are someone else will immediately jump on that same job. That says a lot about the comparative quality of the opportunity. In the end these jobs, as flawed as they are, are still living millions out of even worse conditions every day across the globe.
It seems to me that this is a straightforward monopsony problem: The workers are already at what could be the best job they can get and yet the conditions are still terrible.
They can get a job somewhere else but it won't be as good. Better to protest/strike at their current job than go somewhere else. Especially when you consider that there's no reason why their current employer can't pay more and improve conditions other than greed.
If there was more realistic competition in the area for workers then the pay and conditions would never have gotten to this point.
This is a first and the simplest layer of the argument. If "just quitting" was such a great option, what's the point of the entire labor rights movement?
Indeed, what’s the point?
>But they can always quit
You’d think, right? But part of the unrest leading to this point were two or three waves of breakouts of employees escaping lockdowns by jumping the fences and pushing past roadblocks set up by local authorities.
Then they started pressuring locals to work there.
If I were to switch to an android phone would a better factory get more business?
Gould: One account, one blog post, two tweets.
you have to start from somewhere :) why don't you give me a follow?
I'm sure these protests have nothing whatsoever to do with lockdown and are 100% due to the fact that Foxconn is a 'western capitalist company.'
Interesting that the author felt the need to make an anti-communist comparison to describe a typical capitalist workplace.
If employees hate their job so much, can't they just quit?
More often than not, no. Many of these types of factories are intentionally designed to lock workers into a never ending loop, where they're tied in living paycheck to paycheck, often paying rent for a room that's owned by the same company that runs the factory, buying food from a store that's owned by the same company, etc. There are even cases where workers get paid in cash in a custom "currency" operated by the company so there is no way to ever break free after you're in the loop.
Similar tactics were used in US mining towns in the 19th century:
You just made all that up. The foxconn dorms are free. There is no "foxconn bucks".
Free until you do anything against the company policy. The point stands, the employer controls ever now of your livelihood making the cost of disobedience and switching employment higher.
Is this a joke, or are you that out of touch with what poverty is like?
Definitely a case of Poe's law here.
Many of them have been locked into the factories because of "Corona restrictions" which is just a bad excuse to exploit them.
They aren't being exploited, at least not in the normal way. The Chinese government insists on a zero Covid policy, but they also want to keep the economy running. So you can keep your business running if no one leaves. The alternatives are:
- keep working and earning money, which is why you migrated to the city in the first place. A lot of these migrant workers are bunking it with 4 - 8 other people in one anyway, so it's not like leaving work is some comfy place. But it's more profitable than subsistence farming.
- be locked into your apartment and get no money at all (but still have to pay rent). For the migrant workers who are the manufacturing labor force, that defeats the whole purpose of being in the city in the first place. Besides, they aren't living in comfy apartments.
- the government stop the zero Covid policy so that people can be normal. That's an option anyone but Xi Jinping can take, though.
I've seen some rural villages in Sichuan, and it is definitely subsistence farming. There is not really a feasible way to better yourself besides move elsewhere, so a lot of the parents go work in the city to get a pool of money to improve the lot of their family. Unfortunately, "move elsewhere" is not exactly feasible, either, because of the hukou system, which Mao created to prevent people from moving.
So I'd call it oppression, not exploitation. And it's not the factory owners who are oppressing them, so much as the government. The factory owners are actually providing a means of bettering themselves. (The factory owners might also be exploiting them, but the situation referred to is not an example of that.)
If you’re unhappy with your pay, just start a hedge fund.