Tale of an undercover in China's iPhone factory

A New York University student, who spent six weeks working undercover in one of the Pegatron’s factories manufacturing the iPhone, has come in open to narrate the tale of his experience.

Dejian Zeng, the NYU student, shared his six-week working experience at an iPhone factory in Shangai, China exclusively with the Business Insider. (The whole interview can be read here.) In the factory, he joined the assembly line, where he fed tiny screws into the backs of iPhones. Initially, he worked on iPhone 6S and was later asked to work on iPhone 7.

Here are some interesting abstracts from the piece:

• Six-weeks on the assembling paid him about 3100 yuan (Rs 31,000) and housing for a month.
• Overtime does pay more, but it depends on whether you need to do overtime or not. It also depends on if it's Monday to Thursday or it's Friday. “Friday only work two hours overtime, Monday to Thursday is 2.5 hours overtime work. And then you do one whole day, 8 hours, on Saturday also. So total, the time workers spent in the factory is 12 hours total.”
• The workers sleep in a dorm room, which is shared among eight people.
• Most of the workers at the Pegatron’s factory neither like the job nor hate it. They consider it like any other job—a source to earn some money to support their families.
• You get yelled at from the manager if you caught lying down, even when you are not sleeping at all. If they caught you lying down too often, they’ll deduct money.
• You needs no skills for the job. “People working the factories are also working on becoming a security guard, delivery man, housekeeper. So it's the same kind of level of position.”
• Zen does not see iPhone manufacturing in the US, even if President Trump wishes to. "I won't see it create lot of jobs. I would see workers getting replaced by a lot of machines, because a lot of the work I see in the factory can actually be done by machine. The only reason why we do it is because the labor is even cheaper than the machine.”