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Low-Wage Workers

With the rapid development of the whole society, industrial production has also gradually increased with the continuous reform of the market; it has become a market economy pursuing free trade. Indeed, because of the transforms in the economic system, labors from the working class are the most squeezed and the most overworked; they do not have enough money to survive. Many factory workers, or service workers in the service industry, have to work a lot of hours a day or have to work a lot of part-time jobs a day to cover their necessary expenses but that may not include loans or monthly high rent. Low-wage workers are mostly unable to resist because they struggle to find new jobs or are quickly replaced by new workers. Is there any way to help those workers that suffer low-wage?

Fortunately, I was born in the millennium of 2000, which also enabled me to see the rapid progress of science and technology. When I was in kindergarten, there were many handicrafts; but with the development of science and technology, higher technology production machines were invented. As a result of the invention of machines, production increased; but the amount of knowledge and demand for workers decreased. The factories that the capitalists put in needed to produce large quantities of goods and maximize their profits. Therefore, the division of labor method mentioned by Adam Smith is used to improve the production. Each worker is responsible for only one production part of a product then the final product is pieced together by each worker. In "The Wealth Of Nation,” Smith states the methods of division of labor that, “The greatest improvements in the productive powers of labor, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment, with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labor” (Smith 25). Smith mentioned that the division of labor is indeed efficiency because the work that each worker has to do requires a little amount of knowledge or complexity. Each worker goes to work every day to do the same thing over and over again, so repeating jobs also improve their proficiency in their work.

The most impressive example for me is the Foxconn factory that makes products for Apple in China. First of all, there is an objective factor that China has a large population, so the labor force is relatively less valuable. Apple, based in the United States, is responsible for getting parts made by Foxconn factory to be shipped to countries around the world. The Foxconn factory is one of the most typical examples for me, workers in the factory have a fixed requirement for their working hours and are prohibited from carrying phones during the working hours. Each worker has a different division of labor, such as the first person is responsible for installing the battery, the second person is responsible for splicing the screen, extra. The daily repetition of monotonous tasks does confirm what Smith says is the first benefit of division of labor, “First, the improvement of the dexterity of the workmen, necessarily increases the quantity of the work he can perform” ( Smith 27). From this quote, we can also prove that when Apple launched its products, there was always the first batch of people around the world who could receive their beloved products on time. Therefore, it can be proved that the workers were indeed very efficient.

The first batch of people who received Apple's new products was so exciting that they showed off their new phones or other products in front of the media. But how many people would have thought of the oppressed workers at Foxconn's factory, who are paid low wages each month? Unfortunately, most people care more about buying a high-tech, convenient and cost-effective mobile phone than how these products are produced. Labors at Foxconn’s factory work almost eight hours a day, doing the same repeating job for about $190 a month. Hence, workers just can not afford the expensive rent in the city; basically seven or ten workers are sharing one small room with no privacy at all. There are even many couples who leave their children in the countryside. They come to work together at Foxconn; they would rather not have a big meal every month; leaving as much money as possible for their children and their parents back home.

Because of the exploitation by capitalists, there are also workers who cannot afford to commit suicide. A lot of workers have decided to go on strike because they have been oppressed for too long, but it has done little more than raise wages a little bit, and the factory built a lot of fences to keep workers from jumping off buildings to suicide. As Marx says in “The Communist Manifesto,” “Oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (Marx 65). The oppressor and the oppressed are almost in a struggle because of the disunity of money and power. Therefore, the oppressed to the point of endurance are going to have social protests large or small and maybe even severe enough that the country is going to be involved in dealing with these problems.

Marx talks about changing society into communism, making state property and public resources to avoid class warfare. The poor also have some power to balance the society not to have most of the country's wealth taken up by the few. Of course, the idea of communism is a wonderful but optimistic utopia because in society people are greedy. As long as one person has a greedy mind about public property, the country may soon be in chaos again.

Basically, all countries in the world now have free markets, private properties, and unequal classes. It seems hard to change these realities. In many factories and companies around the world, there are still a large number of people with low wages and even more people living on the streets due to the increasing housing prices. Capitalists are bound to save as much as they can for their own sake, so unless the country regulates and raises the minimum wage, there will still be repression. For me, we can only learn knowledge or unique skills to distinguish ourselves from the public to ensure that we cannot be troubled by the cost of living in the first place. Getting education and knowledge may significantly improve our chances of success. Can we improve the low wage income problem faced by workers? This is still a problem.