In this post, I would like to introduce the story of my brother who has experienced the cell-phone assembly line as a part time job.
There are several leading cell-phone brands in Japan. Most of them use temporary worker as a part time to assemble the cell-phone.
My younger brother applied for this job through temporary employment agency.
Cell-phone brands state that the dormitory is ready for those who are living away from the factory. However, others, who do not have to live in the dormitory, need to wake up at 4:00 am and get ready for the bus which comes and pick them up at 5:00 am. They arrive at the factory around 6:00 am, and start assembling from 7:00 am.
In the first day of the work, people are distributed to specific section after the aptitude test that determines how detailed work they can. My brother was placed the section where people place the CPU chip in the cell-phone.
The schedule and rules were very hard.
The rules that my brother told me that were:
- They are not allowed to talk
- They are not allowed to use their cell-phone
- They cannot take random breaks for bathroom or smoke
- BUT, they can listen to the music with ear-phones or head-phones
The schedules were:
- Work from 7:00 am to 12:00
- Launch time was only 30 minutes
- They work again from 12:30 to 18:00
This is basically 10 hours of work time that against the law, but many brands are functioning like this.
The wage was constituted with two parts. The fixed hourly wage and commission rate, but the commission rate was very low like several ten cents/1.
After one week of work, my brother quitted this job because he was extremely exhausted, and cannot live with it because of overwork and not enough time to sleep to recover. In addition to the tiredness, he told me that the assemble line drove him crazy because the job is so simple and boring. However, he saw many people had gone mad and some security guys came to take those people away.
These jobs can hurt people especially youths who just need money. Those jobs are not mentally and physically healthy.
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