Focus

City full of white-collar Foxconns

By Wang Wen (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-11 07:57

Many well-paid employees holding high-pressure jobs feel over worked and under-valued

While it is well known that China's factory workers are under pressure and poorly paid, office workers with foreign firms in the capital are complaining their lot isn't much better.

"We are only high-end Foxconn workers," complained Eric Hu, a 23-year-old who left his job with a foreign company so he could work for a domestic firm one month ago.

He said he could no longer bear the intense pressure at his old job.

"And I worked in one of the big four accounting firms, a famous foreign company in Beijing."

Hu said many white-collar workers are attracted to such foreign companies because they often pay higher salaries. But he said the hefty pay packets come at a price and many workers cannot cope with the strict deadlines and high expectations.

In that sense, he said, they feel kinship with Foxconn workers. The Taiwanese-owned manufacturing company employs 300,000 workers to assemble cheap electronic parts for worldwide brands, including Apple. The enterprise has been in the news recently after it was revealed that 13 workers had attempted suicide so far this year, apparently because of poor pay and conditions.

China Business News, a Shanghai-based financial daily, reported last month that high-end office workers at foreign firms providing professional services, such as accounting, consulting and legal services, feel under similar pressure at work.

"The only difference is that they get paid more than Foxconn workers and they choose to quit their jobs while some unfortunate workers at Foxconn believe there is no way out but to commit suicide," the report said, quoting white-collar workers in large cities in China.

Hu said he and many of his former colleagues felt under-valued.

He said about 20 of his classmates took similar jobs after they graduated together from a Beijing college in 2008. Within a year and a half, about half had quit their jobs. And he claimed more than 60 graduates from elite universities in Beijing joined his former department at the company in 2008 and of those half have since left.

He said one of his colleagues worked so hard and for such long hours that he had difficulty moving when he woke up one morning and collapsed.

"I decided to leave the company as soon as possible because I feared the heavy pressure at work would harm my health," Hu said.

A survey conducted by a nationwide recruitment firm underlined such anecdotal accounts.

Zhaopin.com, one of the largest human resources service providers in China, surveyed more than 2,000 employees in Beijing late last month. Among them, 58.1 percent said they felt too stressful at work. The average nationwide was 10 percent lower.

The survey also showed more than 60 percent of respondents complained about poor promotion prospects and the need for a pay rise.

"The dissatisfaction with payment and promotion will stay in their minds and if the problems cannot be resolved immediately, they will become mental pressure," said Hao Jian, a senior consultant with Zhaopin.com.

New employees at Hu's former company earn about 4,000 yuan a month after tax. In the second year, they usually get a 30-percent pay rise. However, because of the financial crisis last year, Hu and his colleagues only received a small pay rise, something that fuelled their dissatisfaction.

Hu complained that the financial crisis was blamed for other problems at work and said he did not receive overtime pay at the company, despite working deep into the night almost everyday.

"I was more miserable than the workers at Foxconn because at least they got paid for overtime," he said.

"There was a complex application process for overtime salary and it needed many signatures from managers and directors. Usually, we only worked and did not ask for payment because we knew it was too complex."

He said he and many of his coworkers were too tired after work to do such things as go to KTVs.

"My life was only comprised working and sleeping," he said.

He said workers only fixated on one thing - when to quit their high-pressure jobs.

"So many people in our department quit in recent years and now it is not rare for a manager to have only two staff members, both fresh from college," said an employee on the website www.andrenson.com, which is the Bulletin Board System of four big accounting firms.

He said it is common practice to work overtime every day.

"I am kind of a robot because I have been working for two or three months continuously without weekends and had to stay up late every night till 2:00 am, even later," Xiao Lei, who also works in one of the four big accounting firms, told China Business News.

"My colleagues are worrying that our company might be the next Foxconn."