ASIA: Company Visit to P&G II

On Thursday, we left Hong Kong for a brief excursion to Guangzhou. While in Guangzhou, we were lucky enough to be invited to tour P&G's production facilities. It was quite exciting. We were able to tour the entire shampoo production line - all the way from where the bottles come in to where the finished product goes out.So what's the most interesting part of the assembly line? Your first guess might be to say the robot technology on the assembly line. After all, these robots automatically fill, pack, and brand tens of thousands of these bottles per day with a startling degree of accuracy and virtually no error. But what stuck in my mind the most was the very first stage of the production chain.Empty, brandless shampoo bottles - who knows, maybe even a thousand per minute at peak times - ride down a conveyor belt and are funneled into a giant vat. Humans then pick up these bottles, one after another, and place them upright on a conveyor belt, where they move on to the next stage (probably to be filled with shampoo). It was interesting to see humans performing this task when surely there was a machine that could do this just as well.Turns out, there was a machine that could this just as well - however, it simply cost P&G less to employ people to do this themselves. One of our classmates was told that these assembly line workers start out at about 25RMB (4USD) per hour. You might be saying that hey, that's only $8,000 a year without overtime. But in China, the average per capita income is less than $6,000 a person (and about $11,000 in this specific region). Just goes to show that sorting shampoo bottles for P&G is a hell of enviable job for someone from China.

- Paxton Flesher