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Spoiled to death? Unlikely

By Linda Gibson
Updated: 2010-05-31 11:19

A pair of articles in Friday's China Daily quotes two Beijingers about the lives of factory workers in the light of the suicides at Foxconn in Shenzhen.

One person, a young woman working at the company's Beijing facility in Daxing district, said she was satisfied with the job and thought the compensation was reasonable. She works 10-hour days for a salary that is said to top out at 1,700 yuan ($250) a month.

Assuming she works only five days a week, instead of six, she makes a grand total of 8.5 yuan ($1.25) an hour - at best.

The other person, a sociology professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, criticized young workers as being too weak to withstand pressure.

"We need to change our education methods," she said. "Stop spoiling them and make them tough."

Right there, between those two attitudes, is where you'll find one of China's biggest challenges.

The young worker was satisfied with pitifully little. Apparently, paltry wages, cafeteria food of indifferent quality and a crowded dorm room constitute valuable improvements in her life.

For this one person, that's sad. But when millions, or hundreds of millions of people can be satisfied with so little, it's a tragedy.

Chinese workers have no realistic idea of how much better their jobs and their lives could be. All they know is how much worse they could be. So they're grateful for what little they get.

The professor, however, would probably complain that they aren't nearly grateful enough.

I don't know her. But as a professor, she may be old enough to remember when life in China was extremely hard for almost everybody. You only have to go back one generation to find people who might remember when food was rationed, two to find survivors of turmoil and three to find those who suffered famine.

From that perspective, perhaps life in China today looks easy, too easy to justify people killing themselves when they have jobs, food and shelter.

Between those two extremes, settling for too little a reward or demanding too great a sacrifice, lies a vast middle ground. Since it appears to be foreign territory for many Chinese, let me describe what it's like.

It's a place where one's job isn't allowed to consume more than eight hours a day. Wages are sufficient to allow workers to rent or buy their own living space and furnish it comfortably. Overtime is chosen, not required or necessary for a living.

Workers expect to be treated with courtesy and dignity. They have lives after work, and nobody expects them to forgo time with family, friends or pleasures.

They aren't caught between the despair of suicide or a cruel demand for toughness.

This is not a fantasy utopia. It's how people live in better developed countries. If China is ever to join them, many of its people must learn to expect greater rewards for themselves, and some to demand less sacrifice from others.