Gallery: Shanghai factory workers

There is no shortage of amateur photographers or bloggers in Shanghai, but few have the shelf life of Life on Nanchang Lu blog by Fiona Reilly. One of the older Shanghai English-language blogs, it's been showing lesser-known sides of the city for almost two years now.

Reilly, an amateur photographer, recently joined a group of local shutterbugs on a tour of a clothing factory in Songjiang.

The factory produces clothing samples for customers around the world.

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“They specialize in hats, socks, gloves and mittens," writes Reilly in her blog post titled “Shanghai Factory Girls”. "The hats are fluffy and fur-lined in a mountaineer style, with ear flaps; or, for kids, animal style with fake ears, or with long tails of pompoms,” 

Although it’s easy to imagine this group stepping into the sort of Dickens-era factory that the media likes to portray, Reilly and her fellow visitors were surprised at how far the factory differed from their preconceptions.

The bottom line is that factory work is menial and poorly paid wherever you are in the world, and while we keep buying cute leopard fur hats for our kids, someone, somewhere, is making them.— Fiona Reilly, Shanghai blogger

“I was surprised that the factory was so quiet, clean and spacious,” says Reilly.

“The biggest surprise though was that the women weren't gossiping as they worked. Can you imagine a room full of 40 women and no one is chatting? That all changed during the lunch break of course, when they made up for lost time.”

Although Reilly says she did wonder if the building has been sanitized for the group’s visit, “there were no signs of this, certainly nothing had the appearance of being hurriedly tidied up to put on a good show, and there were no areas off-limits to us,” she notes.

“Perhaps we just got permission to visit the 'right' factory, but I've seen the inside of a few factories now, and what has struck me about all of them is how unlike sweatshops they all are. Once again, our preconceptions of what really goes on in China are being challenged.”

Reilly believes that the dirty, dangerous work places you hear about in China, or anywhere in the world, do exist, but she was happy to shoot this clean and relatively safe workplace in Shanghai showing that in some areas, standards are improving.

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“I guess the bottom line though is that factory work is menial and poorly paid wherever you are in the world, and while we keep buying cute leopard fur hats for our kids, someone, somewhere, is making them,” says Reilly.

Click on the gallery above for images from Reilly’s factory trip, and to see more on her life in Shanghai, check out her blog Life on Nanchang Lu.

A borough-bred Manhattanite, editor and writer Jessica Beaton lived in Shanghai for five years and has now moved to Hong Kong.

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