Having a bad job is better than having no job, but there’s no doubt that monotonous, bottom-wage manual labour is the pits. Photographer Michael Wolf snapped this haunting series of Chinese workers building cheap toys for… us.
The labour depicted here is of a very different kind than that at Foxconn in one important way: these people know what they’re building. Dolls, trucks, little Mickey Mouse figurines. They’re cogs, but not in a machine so vast they don’t know what the end result is. Still, it’s not exactly rewarding work — and their faces show it all, though Wolf tells us the atmosphere in the factory was mostly “busy, not depressing.”
Photos: Michael Wolf. Republished with permission.