You might expect an NYU student to seek out a summer internship doing something more interesting than spending 12 hours a day inserting a single screw into an endless production line of iPhones, but Dejian Zeng did exactly that for his summer project.

He wanted to find out what life was like for workers in an iPhone factory, so spent six weeks as a Pegatron worker in a facility on the outskirts of Shanghai. He reported back on everything from the sleeping patterns to the need to download apps to qualify for free Wi-Fi access in the dorms …

In an interview with Business Insider, Zeng said that the typical working day, including overtime, short breaks and security checks was about 12.5 hours.

  • 30 minutes to clear security to enter the factory
  • 2 hours of work
  • 10-minute break
  • 2 hours of work
  • 50-minute lunch break
  • 2 hours of work
  • 10-minute break
  • 2 hours of work
  • 10-minute break
  • 2.5 hours of overtime

The overtime is theoretically voluntary, Zeng says, but not so much in practice.

Even where workers actively seek overtime, he says, that’s due to financial pressure.

It’s not easy to ask to not do overtime. It’s involuntary. I would say that’s the issue. Workers don’t have a choice. If I don’t want to work, if I’m really tired today and I don’t want to work, I can’t do that. I think that’s the issue.

Apple told BI that it requires its suppliers to limit working weeks to a maximum of 60 hours, and that audits – including no fewer than 16 at the factory where Zeng worked – showed 99% compliance. In its most recent Supplier Responsibility report, Apple said that compliance across its supply chain was 98%. Zeng says he suspects Pegatron has a way to hack the audits, but he doesn’t know how.

Pegatron was, though, very sensitive when Apple staff were visiting.

Pegatron was serious about safety training, he said, because Apple monitored it carefully. But the company had a simple way to deal with tiredness.

He claimed that because Apple monitored worker evaluation of the company’s training, workers were told they had to rate the quality highly.

Zeng also said that opportunities for education and training were in practice limited by the hours people work.

When it comes to time off, workers have access to Wi-Fi in the dorms where they live eight to a room, but need to either pay for it or download apps to qualify for free access.

The obvious suspicion here is that the system is being used to inflate download numbers for apps, presumably in return for payment to Pegatron.

You use the coins to get on the Wi-Fi. Twenty-four hours is 20 coins. And then downloading apps sometimes are like 20 to 30 coins or something. So is it you can buy coins — like I remember it’s like 100 coins about 5 yuan, something like that. But a lot of people just keep downloading. It’s like a business. You need to need to do that to get access to Wi-Fi.

The work is repetitive, he said. At first it’s hard to keep up with the speed of the production line even carrying out a simple task, but eventually you can do it with your eyes closed. One of his jobs, he said, was to put a single screw into the speaker on the case.

Workers are not allowed to bring electronic devices into the factory, so they cannot alleviate the boredom by listening to music or podcasts.

And then, after awhile, you get more familiar to it, and that in the end, I can even do this screw by closing my eyes.

He said that production of pre-production iPhones was easier but especially boring because of the slow pace. He worked on a trial production of the iPhone 7.

Zeng said that stories of the pay being really high by local standards weren’t true – the role was equivalent to being a security guard or housekeeper – but it is easy work to get.

Zeng also joined the many people casting doubt on the idea that Apple could bring iPhone production to the USA.

The whole piece is worth a read.

If it really happened, if factories actually really moved to the US, I won’t see it create a lot of jobs. I would see workers getting replaced by a lot of machines, because a lot of the work I see in the factory can actually be done by machine. The only reason why we do it is because the labor is even cheaper than the machine.

Photo: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg