The dream and reality for young Chinese workers

2014-04-26 09:19

By Cai Muyuan (China Daily Europe)

The dream and reality for young Chinese workers

Lu Erfeng sits on his bed in the tiny, seventh-floor apartment he rents in Shenzhen for 450 yuan a week. There's a cardboard box for a side table, a PC, and not much else.

"I'm sick of working in a factory," he says.

Lu, 21, began working for Foxconn when he was 17. A migrant worker from Henan province, he punches out 3,000 to 4,000 motherboards for Apple computers during each eight to 10-hour shift, six days a week.

"The work is very boring," he says. "You can't talk to each other, you can't listen to music. I think it's very depressing. My friends (at Foxconn) think it's very depressing."

When he first arrived almost five years ago, the base wage at Foxconn was 900 yuan per month. Lu says it went up after the suicide scandal, but free accommodation and meals were also revoked.

"I make around 3,000 yuan per month," he says.

With wages rising nationally, he believes he can make more elsewhere, and has handed in his resignation.

According to China's National Bureau of Statistics, in 2003 the average wage for a migrant worker like Lu was 690 yuan per month.

Last year, a decade on, the average monthly wage for a migrant worker was 2,609 yuan a month, an increase of almost 280 percent.

Kam Wing Chan, a professor and demographer with the University of Washington, says Chinese workers are still very much divided by the socio-economic and geographical divides of town and country.