Saturday, April 7, 2007

Factory life in Hanoi - the reality.

Today, I deviate from my usual postings. Although I have and will continue to introduce interesting places for visitors to enjoy, in reality, factory life is quite boring. Most of the time, my co-workers and I live a quite staid life in dormintories worrying about missing shipments of parts for production, customer pressures to continually cost down, rising commodity prices, competitors building new production facilities, and so forth. This is, unfortunately, the reality resulting from competition. 7:30-17:00 Mon-Sat (with the occational Sat off). Lunch at 45,000VND (.30USD) would be a variation of something as follows:

I think most people don't appreciate what it takes to make the everyday products that they buy and use; and why products are as cheap as they are - with inflation as low as it is even as oil prices rise over 60USD/barrel and copper prices jumping several folds.