Please note the last sentence in this abstract: “… an even bigger problem, which will hit in four to five years’ time, is that workers do not want these jobs any more. It’s not so much about the money, they just don’t want them.”
Good news for next level countries seeking to manufacture for developed countries.
“Yang Jiandong is a Chinese Christmas elf; toys and gadgets division. Here in steamy South China, 6,000 miles away from your front room, the trim and sprightly 39-year-old runs one of the thousands of factories that make the iPads and Furbies, Transformer robots and LeapPads that will soon be waiting under our Christmas trees.
English: Remote Controlled Car (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This year, his favourite gadget is a remote-controlled flying battle drone from the movie Avatar. He giggles when, after navigating it around the showroom, it crashes into the wall. “No problem,” he smiles. “These ones are hard to break”. His company, Attop, turns out 800,000 remote-controlled helicopters a year but also makes accessories for Barbies, puzzles and Hot Wheels cars for Mattel.
In his biscuit-coloured factory, hundreds of workers man the production lines: teenage boys with spiky orange-dyed hair and studded leather jackets, old aunties in woollen trousers and young women who diligently focus on snapping together the shell of the toys or soldering the electronics inside.
One floor down sit the £100,000-a-piece injection moulding machines that crank out the plastic components. Two floors above sit the painters, the most skilled and highly-paid workers in the plant.
They spray the toys with colour or stamp them before moving them to another line for final testing and then boxing.
In the warehouse, boxes of remote-controlled helicopters are marked to go to Costa Rica and Guatemala while Hello Kitty toys are bound for Brazil. “The shipment to the UK left a while back,” a worker says.
There are two commonly held beliefs about Chinese manufacturing. The first is that Chinese factories only churn out cheap, disposable tat.
The second is that they resemble Dickensian workhouses.
But while small, dirty, polluting factories do exist in South China, they are increasingly being squeezed out of the market by well-run, advanced plants like Mr Yang’s.
A recent Chinese scandal which found medical waste being melted into plastic for new toys actually helped Mr Yang’s business, he said. “We had to write to our customers to let them know we did not have any problems,” he says. “Now more buyers turn to trust-worthy companies like ours”.
There is a 100-seat “business academy” with lessons for workers after their shifts, a grand piano in the hallway (“Anyone can play it over lunch”), a mini farm for workers to “relax by growing their own vegetables”, and a research and development department that designed all the Avatar toys in house.
Other plants are even more impressive. Three years ago, a spate of suicides at Foxconn’s Longhua factory convinced the world that the giant factories making our iPhones and iPads are vast, alienating and uncaring.
Today, after intense public pressure, Longhua has become a model factory, with football pitches, reduced working hours and a robot-assisted production line.
Behind the change is consumer pressure. “Ten years ago,” says Mr Yang, “Foreign companies would pick you to make their toys if you could give them a cheap price. They did not care about certification or research and development. But now the first thing they do is check whether you have safety certificates, and whether you are able to certify new toys. It costs huge amounts to get these tests done each time.”
At Attop, the managers believe the smaller toy makers, the ones who have provided cheap toys for years, will soon hit the wall. Christmas next year will be more expensive, and so will the Christmas after that.
“The golden years of the toy business were 1985 to 2000 but since then it has gone really downhill,” said Dave Cave, the British founder of Dragon-i toys in Hong Kong. “First the EU demanded to have all these tests in place. It has made the toys safer, but it has also made them more expensive.”
“Then the Chinese government decided to pay factory workers a fair wage, which of course I support. But costs are rising. And an even bigger problem, which will hit in four to five years’ time, is that workers do not want these jobs any more. It’s not so much about the money, they just don’t want them.””
via Video: Christmas 2013: Inside a Chinese toy factory – Telegraph.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 