Shenzhen Action Electronics
Zhong Her Industrial Park
Baishizhou Nan Shan District
Shenzhen City
Guangdong Province, China
Action Electronics is owned by its Taiwanese parent corporation,
Hwa Yih. There are two Action Electronics factories in China, one
in Shenzhen and the other in Shanghai.
The Shenzhen Action Electronics factory is located in the Zhong Her Industrial Park, which houses several medium to small sized electronics, rubber and plastics factories. The Zhong Her Industrial Park is a joint venture of Taiwanese and Chinese capital. China's investment is in the land, factories and overall management of the zone, while Taiwan's investment is in the actual manufacturing.
Action Electronics, which began operating in 1993, is the largest factory in the zone, housed in a six-story building that includes the production space, offices and storage.
Action Electronics produces 4-inch, 5-inch and 7-inch mini-TV sets, some including radios, or radios together with CD boomboxes, for RCA (Model RT-7945) which retails for $299. Mini-TVs carrying Action's own label are sold at Circuit City and Wal-Mart. The National Labor Committee purchased a 5-inch Action color TV at Circuit City for $149. Action Electronics exports to the U.S. and to Japan.
There are 500 workers in the factory, mostly young women, split into
eight production lines. The average age of the women is 20 years
old, however some as young as 14 are employed there. The women are
migrant workers from Sichuan, Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi provinces.
The factory actively recruits in the local high schools in these rural
areas.
Working 7 days a week during the peak season, sometimes from 7:30
a.m. to 11:00 p.m. or midnight.
During the slack season, the women generally work a five-day, 45 to 47½-hour workweek. In the peak season, the women must put in a seven-day workweek, working some days from 7:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. or midnight. During particularly large rush orders there may be mandatory overtime hours required even beyond midnight, which is why the factory has established a special 3 rmb (36 cent) per hour premium for working past midnight.
Peak Season Hours: Seven-day Workweek:
If they had to work until midnight, the workers would be at the
factory 16½ hours a day. On average, during the busy season,
the women could be at the factory for up to 80½ hours a week, while
being paid for 57½ to 65 hours.
The base wage in the assembly section is 360 rmb per month, $43.37, which comes to $10.01 a week-25 cents an hour for a regular 40-hour workweek. However, most workers receive a 70 rmb bonus each month ($8.34 for the month, $2.11 a week) if they meet production goals, behave well and do not come late or miss days.
Overtime hours are paid at 30 cents, except when working past midnight, when the premium rate rises to 36 cents.
So during the peak season, if the factory was running on a seven-day, 65-hour week schedule, an assembly worker would earn $81.93 a month, or 29 cents an hour.
Assembly worker's wage
360 rmb $43.37 base wage per month
70 rmb $8.43 production/attendance monthly bonus
250 rmb $30.12 for 100 hours of overtime per month at 2.5 rmb per hour
680 rmb $81.93 U.S. total per month
Assembly workers' fully-loaded wage
The more skilled workers who make the main body of the TV earn a
higher base wage of 32 cents an hour, or $12.79 for a forty-hour
workweek. They also receive a higher attendance and production
bonus of 120 rmb, which comes to $14.46 a month, or $3.61 a week.
They earn the same 30-cent an hour overtime premium.
Skilled Workers' fully-loaded wage
However, it appears that the workers have to pay out of pocket for
their food, for which the factory charges 120 rmb a month, $14.46 U.S.
This would lower the weekly take-home wage of an assembly worker to $15.30
for a 65-hour workweek, or 24 cents an hour. A skilled worker's
weekly take-home wage would drop to $19.47, or 30 cents an hour.
The workers report that the food they receive at the factory canteen
is of poor quality.
Workers are housed 10 to 12 people to a small, cramped dorm room,
with three double bunk beds along each side wall, with only a narrow corridor
down the center of the room remaining open. There is no space for
the workers to store their few possessions.
Many of the young women workers said they would like to be able to study
English or computer programming at night. But they have no time to
do so given the long overtime hours they must work. Also, they said,
they do not have much energy left when they finally return to their tiny
dorm rooms after the day's work.
Using U.S. Customs Department shipping documents made available
in the Piers database, the National Labor Committee was able to trace an
Action brand 5-inch mini color TV set (model CAN 5503) made in the Action
Electronics Factory in Shenzhen City in southern China to a Circuit City
store on 14th Street in New York City.
Two thousand one hundred Action 5-inch color TV sets, shipped from China on an Evergreen Line vessel arrived in Los Angeles on October 26, 1999, where they were declared to have an estimated customs value of $72,904. Each TV had a customs value of $34.69, which represents the total materials and labor cost to make and ship the product.
The 5-inch Action color TV (Model CAN 5503/Made in China) which the NLC purchased in Circuit City cost $149, which represents a 430 percent mark-up over the total cost to make the TV, including Action Electronics' profit.
The big losers are the assembly workers in China, who are denied their rights and paid just 25 cents an hour to make these sets.
In the global sweatshop economy, the 430 percent mark-ups, a company's huge advertising budget, booming corporate profits, the CEO's enormous salary, all of it rides on a pyramid scheme in which those at the bottom, in the developing world, are stripped of their rights and toil for pennies an hour to funnel money up the pyramid to those at the top.
If the U.S. retailers were willing to give up just a tiny piece of their
substantial mark-up, then it would be possible to pass it along to the
workers in China, whose wages would then begin to climb to at-least-subsistence
levels.