Made in China - part II

Boing Boing reports that Bunnie has started blogging his China thoughts in detail, with a series of great posts:

Skill: Factory work in China isn’t unskilled labor — anything but. Watching the expert sewing in one of Bunnie’s videos is like going to a close-up magic show, an astounding and effortless-seeming exhibition of manual dexterity. Contrast that with the skill of the people — some children — making rubberized tags, by hand, their arms branded with character logos burned in by accidental brushes with hot molds. And then there’s the guy who can get rid of a $2 component by substituting $0.16 worth of parts and $0.05 worth of labor, paying someone to join together tiny sub-components all day.

Dedication: When it’s production crunch time, Chinese factories run to a romantic idealism that’s part Bushido, part IBM Song Book. Bunnie describes the final stages of the manufacturing setup for Chumby, and the intense personal dedication the factory workers showed — and recounts an amazing story of a talented senior engineer who didn’t know what Chumby was for because she didn’t know what the Internet is.

Feeding the Factory: Like Google and other high-tech employers, Chinese factory-cities attract the best workers by offering food. Factory cafeterias aren’t the same as the Googleplex’s gourmet chef. Chinese factories run a little like factory farms, isolating new members of the cohort to prevent the spread of disease: guests eat off disposable plates and cutlery to stop them passing germs on to the factory’s live-in, eat-in workers, who are subjected to intense medical scrutiny to prevent factory disease outbreaks.

Scale: The size of the factories, iPod City’s own factory off-ramp, the enormous cohort of women workers in Shenzen — China’s manufacturing is at a scale that beggars the imagination.