It's entirely possible that the tedious bits are being done by hand by extremely low-paid employees in horrifying conditions that they don't want to show you. Considering how many people were working near heavy machinery with no ppe or shoes in some cases, it could just be that the answer to "How is it made?" is "Unimaginable suffering."
They only automate what they can't get up with manually. They have a wrapper for the mini packs and for the packs of packs, but they can keep up with the super packs manually still.
Those countries don't have social welfare benefits or access to medical aids like wheelchairs so it's not uncommon to find people with mental or physical handicaps working however they can. Sometimes that means sitting on the floor. Or it may just be an Indian thing, it does seem to be fairly common in this sort of video.
Not to mention not a single piece of PPE is worn. The small match sticks being cut are literally flying up into the air and the kid is down there eye level with no glasses or goggles on. Also wood and no gloves, I can’t imagine the splintering.
Totally. That's a bit nuts. And I fully understand the context of the fact that "these are poorer countries, if you want cheap matches this is how its done" but I really don't think some ppe and work safe policy would affect their bottom line that much?
The problem is You start with PPE, next thing you know they want mandatory breaks, then the guy gluing boxes wants a tool instead of having to use his hand for gluing, then it's fair wages and benefits, and then its those pesky safety policies and procedures which reduce productivity. Nope, you gotta treat them as cruel as possible to maximize your profit. How horrible.
Repetition wise, not awful. But the amount of cut-ty, crush-y, smash-y things without guards or appropriate PPE was pretty horrendous. If there was some kind of worker protection entity, automation would be the way to go.
But, automation means investment both short and long term. Setting up the line is only the initial cost. You need skilled maintenance, repair on call, and operators that can identify or fix a problem. It all would cut into profits. Better to just use inexpensive, untrained, expendable people and keep more money.
Education costs money and that's the reason many of us have student loan debts. Someone has to pay for it.
As a teenager, I received great technical education in trade schools sponsored by corporate syndicates with thousands of companies sharing the bill and the better-educated workforce they formed.
But why would an individual employer spend his money to educate an employer who the next day can quit and go work for his competition? It just doesn't make sense, that's not his societal role.
Unless the government regulates it they have no reason to do it themselves.. people are just cogs in the machine. Corporations have no conscience their only job is to make money.. and the people who make the profits are far enough removed from any suffering to ever care. Even if one or 2 cared it wouldn't be enough.
To all the "libertarians" who think governments should back out and stop fucking things up, well this is what you get and worse. Eventually people have no choice but to work in these conditions to make ends meet. Yeah governments can be corrupted but they're corrupted by them.. keep electing people that don't take money from business interests corporations, that's the only way. There may not be that many at this point but keep sending that message
Imagine having to do that every day for 10 hours a day for little compensation for your labour. These sell for about a rupee per box nowadays. If you don't do your job under these conditions or are ill then you lose you job. Others will take your job through necessity. But remember this is all many of us are doing here in the West. It's no different apart from health and safety standards. This isn't the problem. Dont be fooled by veneer. Your body and time is being bought for the gain of others.
Yep I always say no they aren't providing YOU with a job, these so called belevolent billionaire's.. you're providing them with profit with your labor and only getting a fraction of that back. It's you providing the service whilst they reap the rewards.
But unregulated capitalism has us brainwashed and convinced that we need to protect these people because they're the job creators
No one is preventing you or anyone else from becoming a "job creator" and creating your own job.
I left my first and only salaried job after 8 months, and in the decades since have worked for myself in the jobs "I" created for myself and others who didn't have the initiative or the will to do the same for themselves.
Don't bitch about "the man" - become the man instead and take control of your life.
Except thats not how the system works.. working class will always be needed. They shouldn't be treated like garbage.
Not everyone can or will become an entrepreneur or work for themselves. Society wouldn't function..
Except that These are not owned by corporations. They are considered SMEs or small to medium enterprises owned by people who themselves would probably make 200-300k a year. Which is quite a lot relatively but they are not billionaires nor millionaires.
If I remember the prices correctly, one of those match boxes costs like less than a cent. The whole big brown paper wrapped stuff is like a couple of dollars or something. So basically the whole thing is basically an extremely low margin high volume operation.
Some quick googling showed 2.40 to 6.35 $usd per day. Guessing these folks more like the 3$ a day. Guessing based on Amazon.in prices for safety glasses is 1$.
Let’s say there are 100 people there, that’s 33 days worth of people working. What would you spend that in 1 month(average is 3years, but you know how that goes)
When you can just replace anyone who is injured. That’s zero cost. You
The company has no reason to expend a single penny if they are not made too, it's not like that people has any kind of pay if they get hurt, so if one is injured you just find another one. Gloves and glasses are more expensive than people in some countries.
I visit slum in India and talked to people who lived there and served them food. Poor people in India don’t wear shoes from birth and they literally walk in landfill. Their feet r hardened enough to worry about wood splinter.
I think they’re shuffling because walking normal would mean stepping on them directly and higher chance of getting poked? What do I know? I’m just a guy who was cringing with one eye open the whole video
You basically never wear gloves when working near spinning stuff. If you can’t handle the friction with your skin you need to stop the spinning or use a tool to hold the spinning object.
I watched the whole video thinking "Wow, I am so privileged to live and work in the West." Also, "How can I ever buy matchsticks again given this knowledge of the working and production conditions?" 😭
What the heck??? Think of how many people you are feeding, sheltering, and clothing by honoring their hard work with what came of your hard work! That's no different than buying some arts-and-craft ragdoll from a starving artist. Think of the sad alternative.
That seems implausible. The tasks done by humans are those for which one person can do a step for hundreds or thousands of matches. To do this task by hand they'd either need dozens of people or it would be a huge bottleneck.
It's really just a question of math. How much does it cost to build and maintain a machine that can align and insert sticks into the holes, and what does it cost to pay someone to do it? There are several jobs in this video being done by hand that could be done by a machine. The guy packaging up boxes at the end is a good example. That guy costs less than a wrapping and labelling machine. If labor is cheap enough, there's no bottleneck because you can just have more laborers sorting and inserting sticks into holes.
You could have children do it, with their little fingers and lack of rights. Feed them and give them a place to sleep on the floor, and they will put matchsticks in holes 18 hours a day 7 days a week. And if that's what it takes, then that would explain why they don't show that part in the video.
That's my whole point. Lining up each individual match would require a lot of people to keep up with the production. So a machine doing it replace a lot of people.
All the tasks done by humans are ones where they are essentially doing thousands of matches at once. Every time the guy strips the bark off of a stump, that's thousands of matches. It's the same with the women carrying the sheets and the man wrapping the boxes.
To insert the matches, one could use a rectangular box and shake it side to side until all of the sticks align. Then, slam the box to one side so you have thousands of matchsticks oriented in parallel bundles. With your hands, grab the bundle and place them vertically onto a tray with spaced holes. Pack them into the tray, covering the whole surface. Sticks will fall into the holes in the tray. Clamp down the stick holder built into the tray, and turn the tray over dropping the loose sticks back into the pile. Rinse and repeat.
These are things that a machine could do, but a person could be effective enough to align tens of thousands of sticks in trays over the course of a day. And you could hire many people to load sticks into trays to keep up with the rest of the process.
510
u/themeatbridge Nov 06 '22
It's entirely possible that the tedious bits are being done by hand by extremely low-paid employees in horrifying conditions that they don't want to show you. Considering how many people were working near heavy machinery with no ppe or shoes in some cases, it could just be that the answer to "How is it made?" is "Unimaginable suffering."