When a powerful brand squeezes its supplier's price to keep the contract, the supplier's thin margins leave nowhere to absorb the cut except the line managers and workers below. The brand keeps the lion's share of profit while labour makes up under two percent of the retail price, so the pressure lands on the people with the least room to give.
The excitement of a fixed launch date for consumers turns, on the factory floor, into sudden surges of production with 12- to 15-hour shifts. The calendar of demand set by the brand decides the calendar of exhaustion for those who build the product.
The same rush that drives overwork also makes the factory vulnerable, because a stoppage at a key point in a global chain can't be absorbed. Workers have used that moment to strike or slow down for better pay and conditions, though such actions stayed short-lived and confined to one factory.
Students sent to factories as "interns" are used as a large, flexible workforce, with 150,000 in a single summer, assembling devices rather than learning a trade. The state, intrusive elsewhere, applies a light touch to labour rules, which lets this abuse of the training system continue.
A workplace that keeps workers isolated, overworked and subject to petty bureaucratic cruelty breeds despair. Then, when workers break down, the official explanations point to private causes and none to management or work pressure. The authors set out to find how hopeful young people came to such an end, so that it would not happen again.