If we just get into the factory, we can see the chairs that have been changed.
Firstly, let me just content.
If you could ask.
Maybe we go over to the dorms now.
But if you could ask, if there's any way, we can just go to that one place.
We don't need a factory tour.
We just want to see.
This is Keith Bredge, reporting in Western China.
Over the past year, the New York Times has focused on the globalization of production of electronic devices,
including the sometimes grim labor conditions at factories making Apple iPhones, iPads, and laptop computers here.
After publishing reports about harsh and sometimes unsafe environments,
we began to hear about a response from Apple, as well as its contractors,
and efforts to improve working and living conditions for employees.
We also heard that Hewlett-Packard might already be following better practices
that could be a model for others in the electronics industry.
We decided to come check if there were any real changes.
We began our trip in the city of Chongqing in southwestern China at two factories,
a very new model factory run by a company called Quanta,
and an older factory managed by a company called Foxconn,
which has been in the news in the past year, over harsh working conditions.
Both factories are making computers exclusively for Hewlett-Packard.
And the question is, if Hewlett-Packard can manage to improve working conditions,
can the rest of the industry also do so?
Companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard don't own these factories.
They contract with factory owners to have their products made.
But as some of the largest customers in the world, they have significant influence
over how the factories are run.
We're trying to change, and again, it is not perfect.
HP Executive Tony Profit showed us around.
There's one big change immediately evident.
HP's new business model brings the factory to the workers.
Traditionally, factories have been in big coastal cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen,
and factory workers came from other parts of the country, usually in London far away.
HP's factory in Chongqing is different.
They built where potential employees live, and the factory does employ many locals.
This allows workers to go home and see their families more frequently.
I'm a local from Chongqing. We have two days off each week.
We can go home every weekend, since our home is near.
Your mother must think you are a good daughter.
Yes, every time I come home, my mother is very happy.
I used to work in a different factory, and they let me work overtime,
so I would make more money and have more savings.
So why did you move here?
Because my home is near here.
We visited assembly lines as well as recreational and dormitory facilities.
The facilities for workers at Quanta looked like some American college campuses.
Workers have access to free food, internet lounges, a martial arts gym,
and even two karaoke bars.
The dormitories also include venues like bookstores, a pharmacy,
and a hair salon where a cut costs a little over a dollar.
You now have about 13,000 workers at the factory here,
and they're expanding, they're preparing to have 40,000 workers here,
all of them making computers for Hewlett-Packard.
Quanta and HP allowed us to spend roughly eight hours walking anywhere
and filming anything we wanted.
They had warned us in advance that they might try to block us from filming,
but in the end, we had full access.
Now we're traveling on the high-speed train from Chongqing to Chengdu
from the Hewlett-Packard operations to the Foxconn operations for Apple.
A fatal explosion took place there that the New York Times described
in an earlier installment of the Iconomy series.
One of the things we're going to try to do today is to follow up,
to find out what changes Foxconn has made and what challenges lie ahead
as Foxconn and Apple say they are trying to improve working conditions.
We're at the Foxconn factory now in Chengdu, in western China.
It has 160,000 workers, and its most famous product is the Apple iPad.
The Foxconn factory here did not allow us to come in, much less roam around freely.
The five people we initially spoke to at Foxconn were pre-screened by the factory,
and we had to interview them in a building just outside the factory gate.
There we met Ms. Pugh, who told us that she has received two raises this year,
and she has seen a change in corporate culture that began in February and March.
Ms. Pugh told us about improved safety conditions,
and she told us how the plastic stool, on which she used to sit all day,
had been replaced with a chair with a very low back,
and then with a second chair with a full height back that actually provided some support.
I used to sit with my back straight all the time.
When there weren't many things to do, I could not lean back or rest, but now I can.
Yes, there have been changes this year.
There are lots of training programs aimed at improving workers' professional skills and work ethic.
Ms. Pugh then offered to show us her dormitory.
Six people live in a single dorm room.
We noticed the balcony door and the window were both jammed wide open
when we visited Ms. Pugh's room, and nobody had been able to push them closed.
You can't make 160,000 people happy all the time, perhaps even most of the time.
But the question is whether you can treat them with a standard of decency
that would meet an impartial outside observer's sense of what's right.
Despite our best efforts, the company would not let us into the factory even to see Ms. Pugh's new chair.
So we left the factory in dorms and discreetly returned after nightfall to an area of eateries near the dorms.
We wanted to meet people without being visibly shadowed by company-minders and government security personnel.
In the course of reporting this story, my colleagues and I spoke with more than 70 Foxconn employees
one at a time in Chengdu over the course of a month to get a sense of what has changed.
Foxconn is more humane than other companies in terms of company culture or the cafeteria and so on.
It is more disciplined and stable. It doesn't matter if it is the annual leave or Lunar New Year,
there is always welfare for the employees. As an ex-soldier and employee at Foxconn, Foxconn is just like home to me.
Yet many workers, particularly young men and women in their late teens who grew up as only children
because of China's one-child policy, do not want to live under quasi-military discipline.
Several workers told us of obscenity-laden harangs by factory foremen at Foxconn when they made mistakes
or did not work quickly enough. Two women told of a friend who had returned in tears to her dormitory
and even briefly thought of suicide. They refused to go on camera.
Such stories were the exception, however, not the rule.
But they show that the Foxconn factory in Chengdu can still be a tough place to work at times.
One of the biggest changes this year has been that these factories are limiting the number of hours people are allowed to work.
That has reduced overtime pay. But the factories have been raising basic pay,
so workers keep overall compensation roughly the same and have more free time.
The picture that emerges is one of a company that is making some changes, particularly material changes,
but the corporate culture has changed much less.
For the Apple iPads, are they being produced yet by workers under conditions
that many Americans or Europeans would choose for themselves? Probably not.
Are they being produced under conditions that are much better than those 10 years ago in China?
Yes, and compared to a year ago, a little better, but it's still undergoing change.
With Apple and HP contractors employing hundreds of thousands of people across China,
the changes that they carry out here could become an example for manufacturers across China.
For The New York Times, this is Keith Bredger in Western China.
