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ripperdoc23 t1_j734r0w wrote

Reply to comment by animal56 in ‘iPhones are made in hell’: 3 months inside China’s iPhone city - Workers describe a peak production season marred by labor protests and Covid-19 chaos, right as Apple reconsiders its China supply chain. by speckz

I worked an office job (IT admin) where my main home base was a commercial print location. You’re spot on. The only job in the shop that seemed interesting was die cutting, but otherwise there’d be people called in for 12-hour shifts on a rush job so they could ship a few pallets of saddle-stitched brochures out. Then you wouldn’t see the saddle-stitch guy for 3 days, then he’d get called in. Pressmen and 2nd pressmen would complain a lot because the traditional setup is 3 operators but they managed to cut that to 2 jobs with the 2nd pressman playing a sort of jack of all trades mode. Long shifts of hearing the machines click away, hot or cold depending on season, lower pay than you’d expect for a trade with no raises in sight, etc. Manufacturing anything can take a lot of labor and I’m not shocked by what’s in the article, I think most people just haven’t been exposed to the pace and conditions of factory/logistics life.

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MrLanesLament t1_j739c40 wrote

I also work in a factory, in health and safety.

The IT department seems to be seriously thankless at my place. Most of what they do is sit and monitor screens spitting out data feeds.

Until something important breaks, then whoever is unlucky enough to answer their phone at 3am gets called in to work 14+ hours until the problem is fixed and everything connected to it has been re-tested.

Also, quite a few of our IT people are much older than one might expect. They’ve been with the company since it’s heyday in the late 80s to mid 90s. Most of our manufacturing equipment is from Europe, much is outdated, some machines still run with floppy disks, and the only certified techs remaining live in Italy or Finland or whatever the machines were made. We can pay the insane cost of flying them in, or IT can learn the stuff and try to figure it out.

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6spooky9you t1_j75db9x wrote

I one time spent 5 hours with my colleague troubleshooting a complex laboratory slide printer at 4 in the morning. It was the only printer we had that could print histopathology slides, so until we had it fixed the entire histo department was closed.

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TheHabeo t1_j75fgg9 wrote

I'm a commercial priting and packaging factory manager. We generally try to minimize 12h shifts but sometimes there are weeks where workers has to go full week 12h shifts Sunday included to make deadline. There are workers who by the end of the year had not used any of their paid day off.

Ofcourse as compensation for the strenuous working condition, they are allowed regular smoke brake with some regulation and we made sure there are enough operators always. And their incomes are considered pretty high by local standard.

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ripperdoc23 t1_j75hfgk wrote

Yah, in my experience it was always sales overpromising that led to those long 12x7 shifts. "Oh yeah we can get that out easily in 2 days" that sort of shit. When you're making 10x what the average employee in the shop makes (that shop was still doing 10-15% commissions on $100k-500k or so jobs), you tend to be able to drag everyone else around by the dick. Stupid but that's how it was there.

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