Interesting points to me:

> Late last year, a series of crises at the world’s biggest iPhone factory — a Foxconn facility in Zhengzhou, central China — underscored Apple’s need to diversify its manufacturing partners. According to one estimate, the factory’s delays cost Apple $1 billion a week.

> Some of China’s manufacturing strengths will be hard for India to match. China’s one-party system goes to great lengths on Foxconn’s behalf, investing billions of dollars to help set up factories, subsidize energy and shipping, and recruit and bus in workers during labor shortages. Independent unions are banned in China.

In India, Apple’s suppliers have to contend with local policymakers, landowners, and labor groups. The country lacks China’s vast network of material and equipment makers, who compete for Apple orders by cutting their own margins. “Apple has been spoiled in China,” a senior manager at an Apple supplier, who was recently deployed from China to India, told Rest of World. “Here, except labor, everything else is expensive.”

> Padmini grew up as one of five siblings in the countryside near the ancient city of Tirunelveli — a nine-hour drive south of Chennai. The 26-year-old has a nursing degree, but felt “trapped” being on call 24/7 as a stay-at-home nurse.

Padmini got an assembly line job at Foxconn in 2021. Initially, she felt overwhelmed — the protective clothing, the machinery, the ominous “please cooperate with us” slogan on the wall. Having lived her whole life in inescapable tropical heat, she struggled to adjust to what felt to her like freezing cold air-conditioning. “I didn’t even know what a tweezer was,” she told Rest of World. “I didn’t know the name. I didn’t know how to hold it.”

Padmini now shares a modest one-bedroom apartment in Sunguvarchatram with eight other women — five sleep in the hall, and four in the bedroom. They each pay 1,250 rupees ($15) in rent. “It is a little difficult,” Padmini said. She rarely sees her roommates, who all rotate through different shifts once a week — 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., or 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. — and only have Sundays off.

Every workday, Padmini rides a Foxconn shuttle bus to the factory, passes a metal detector, puts on an anti-static gown over her kurta, and sits down at the assembly line, where, every hour, she’ll stitch together at least 495 volume control parts.

> At the same time, the expat staff enjoy the Indian work culture of tea breaks, chatting with colleagues, and going home on time. They recognize they are helping the company spread a Chinese work culture that they know can be unhealthy. At Foxconn’s factories in China, people strive to exceed their targets, sacrifice leave days, and stay late to impress the bosses.

The Chinese workplace is too neijuan, or “involuted,” several expat employees said. The term, increasingly popular in China, describes the incessant competition in Chinese society and the grinding race to the bottom that comes with it. “Gradually, we’re bringing involution to India,” joked an engineer.

> On the assembly line, Foxconn’s targets were tough to reach, workers said. Jaishree, 21, joined the iPhone shop floor in 2022 as a recent graduate with a degree in mathematics. (With India’s high level of unemployment, Foxconn’s assembly line has plenty of women with advanced degrees, including MBAs.)

> Padmini and two other workers told Rest of World that Foxconn prefers to hire younger women. Padmini, at 26, believes she is close to the age where the company might consider her too old. “They used to hire women up to age 30, now they hire only up to 28,” she said.

> At the factory [after the iPhone 15 launch], Foxconn threw a party. While assembly line workers remained bent over their workstations to produce more phones, engineers and office staff ate cake and other snacks while executives thanked them for their hard work.

> During the first week of October, the national holiday celebrating Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday fell on a Monday and created a rare two-day weekend for Foxconn employees. Li planned to visit the Taj Mahal. He would spend a good deal of the weekend in buses and airplanes, but figured it would be worth it — he wanted to have seen it before his time in India was up.

But a few days before he was due to leave, Li had to cancel. Management had announced that the factory needed to stay open to meet targets. Sunday would be a workday.