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Comment by knwang | Hacker News Reader

Foxxcoon pays about 400 USD a month - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/technology/foxconn-to-rais...

and if that's for 7 days a week 10 hours a day as the reporter said, that's 300 hours.. so 1.33 dollars per hour.

BTW, the typical salary range for a junior Ruby dev in a second or third tier city in China is about 800 - 1600 USD per month. Just to put things in perspectives

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The article mentions it takes 48 people to make oil markings on back plate. That means 19200$/month for wages. I could make a robot that's 10x more productive for half the price.

What's the typical wage for unskilled labor? That seems like a more relevant data point.

Elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4510271 It's not bad.

I'm not sure that gives any perspective. It's pretty obvious that any kind of "skilled labor" like programming will pay better than "unskilled labor" like making oil dots on a piece of aluminum.

The point is that just on salary, it's not bad at all, for where the factory is.

But they work a lot more hours.

And to put the "working hours" thing in perspective, it is typical in cities like Shenzhen to work their programmers 10 hours a day, five and a half days a week. So what sounds like horrible from a Western perspective may not be "too horrible" in the local sense. Remember, all those workers volunteered to work there and they can leave as they want. Sure, it's unbearable for some white collared journalist from Shanghai, but what about someone otherwise would have to plant rice in the field under the sun, or go down a tunnel to mine coal?

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