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Hardware Manufacturing in China's 'Hot Zone'
solferino writes "'Anything you can make for $100, we can make for $40,' Chen says, summing up his commercial philosophy.
An interesting profile in Wired magazine of the computer hardware manufacturing 'hot zone', situated around the pearl river delta in mainland china, just outside Hong Kong.
The factories are mostly financed and operated by Taiwanese business interests. The article looks at life and business in the city mainly from the point-of-view of these 'foreigners'."
We want cheap computers, but don't care for politics. Lets use (next to) slave labour in a communist contry!
My biggest problem with semi-conductor companies producing in 3rd world contries is that these factories do no require much manual labour so the money saved isn't that much. Of course land and construction will be cheap.
It is also nice to see the communist government claiming to be more "fair" letting the "evil" market economy enter whenever it is profitable. This makes them even worse, clinging to a lye preventing the people to gain privileges and a better standard while letting the "right" businesses in. I can't help it, but I suspect that bribes and corruption is very wide spread in this kind of areas.
EricKrout.com
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Yes, lets all assume its slave labor.
My father-in-law, now retired, was an electrical engineer in China. He made a decent living, by Chinese standards. How much did he make? About $125 US a month.
THAT is where the savings are coming from. You're paying 20 times as much here.
"It works" only if you are looking at the equation from the point of view of money. As the book "No Logo" explains well, there are similar economic zones in vvarious developing countries around the world where people are exploited to produce things at extra low prices so we in the West can get our fix of technology/fashion.
China has a terrible record on human rights and so is a popular place to set up sweatshops. The fact that they are owned by Taiwanese immigrants makes no difference - an exploiter is an exploiter no matter what their race!
I just wish there were more examples of companies using these services listed in the article so that we knew who to boycott!
A little planning goes a long way...
Amen brother.
I doubt that China will let freedom of speech reign supreme. Does anyone think these people want to make anything but crap wages their whole lives? Give them a better life, and you'll have the whole system collapse when they want something more for themselves.
Yes, I know the counterargument about this one. Heard it a lot. "Blah blah best wages they ever had blah blah." So here is my response.
Don't you want to make better wages right now? Doesn't everyone? What if they want to unionize? What if they want to speak out against unfair working conditions? What if the corporation is going to have unsanitary and toxic byproducts spilling out all over China...
No wait. We know that one already. Pollute away. Happens everywhere in starting industry. As long as the PRoC gets a little profit, its all good.
I am not saying that it isn't good for the Chinese people that they are getting manufacturing jobs. I am saying that we should excourage them to be as free and open with their work as everyone else. That we should not be satisfied until everyone is livign a standard liek we are, if not better.
Honestly, I really hate the idea that just because a bunch of people live under a jackboot thug regime, it means that they we somehow desrve to be better off and recieve the fruits of exploitation.
As I sit here and look at my compter:
UNIX/Linux Consulting
There are 225 million chinese unemployed (counting both rural and urban unemployed) in the PRC that would desperately want these jobs. Out of an estimated 800 million strong labor force that works out to about 28% unemployment. The unemployment rate in the US, last I checked, was 5.9% and people are already very nervous about jobs, nobody's hiring, people are taking a lot more abuse from their bosses, etc.
Get real. As long as PRC employment is so high, people are going to be scared to lose what they have. So what kind of companies are going to go to such a country where the politicians are all corrupt, the bureaucracy is mind numbing, and objectively the whole government has no business being stable with multi-year 20%+ unemployment levels and growth petering out? You betcha you're going to see lots of sweat shops. If the world's really lucky we're going avoid seeing the prospect of a chinese civil war complete with nukes tossed around. But we need to be very lucky for that to happen.
Ah, yes.
You see, a few people protesting sweatshops *do* have a valid point -- if what they're doing is specifically trying to get existing sweatshops to pay out more money.
The thing is that the entire movement was started by and is a tool for the US labor protectionists.
What you're doing right there neatly falls into the propoganda being put out. You're trying to avoid countries with "unfair labor laws" *entirely*, not trying to figure out what companies there pay their workers more. You're simply avoiding non-US products.
And in doing so, you cause far more damage to the "poor, exploited" foreign workers than the Nike-buyers. You see, the reason those workers are working under such extreme conditions is because they *have* to to avoid starving. Companies can get away with said wages because people there are *starving*.
So, you've been swayed by AFL/CIO images of "giving a poor, exploited foreign worker better wages", and are ending up depriving them of jobs and starving them. Wonderful.
Until there's a labor *shortage* instead of surplus in said countries, there will never be wage increases. Not going to happen.
Ironically enough, buying products from companies with production facilities in said countries is likely to help the workers, since it increases demand for local labor. If the levels of demand can produce a labor shortage...then sure enough, wages will rise.
Any other solution, like government-mandated minimum wages, just produces inflation, as the enconomy corrects itself to keep the buying power of those on the bottom the same.
May we never see th
Who said RCA was well built in 1975? Sony cleaned up the electronics market by 1985 by making stuff that was superior.
Today, much of what Sony does is not superior because they have opted to use Chinese slave labor. Seen a dream cube lately? Twenty years ago they were rock solid with a flourescent tube display that auto dimmed but was bright enough to see in daylight. Today, that same machine has a poorly fitting switch and cheap LEDs for a display. But then again, who esle is making anything? The dream cube sits on a shelf next to an even more repulsive RCA from a similar factory.
Wait did I say "slave labor"? Yes I did. China is a command economy run by a party which will enforce it's line by death. No dissent is allowed because there is no free press. Workers may flock to this place, but that is because they are left with few alternatives. Comfort is realative and people are easier to control when you make things we take for granted special and only for the privaleged. Most people, even the special ones are have little choice about what they do. As in 1984, purge is continual for the special.
This system is only working for a few, and only because they have a free economy to sap. Look at the former USSR, now that you can. They had a highly technicaly educated society, yet most things we take for granted were rare, vehicle ownership, TVs, even radios in a country that would love for everyone to have propaganda everywhere! Most if not all women were forced to work so child rearing was communal, as it always was for peasants in Russia. The command economy works by creating artificial scaricty. Without trade with free economies, most ordinary people lived only to labor in what we would consider poverty. This in a country with more land mass than any other and vast resources. Bigwigs lived well, sent their children to good schools and risked a bullet in the back of the head. Communists are always like this. The only difference betweeen China and the former USSR is that countries of the free economies are dumb enough to risk all their capital in a place that will surely take it all when the money stops flowing in.
The article sums it up nicely as it tells us the sickening life of self abuse in wine slop the lucky live we pay for and then the average story. This is you, and the woman is your would be wife:
In background and motives, these workers differ little from Zhang Ping, the hostess at the nightclub. She graduated from high school in Harbin but flunked the college entrance exams (only about half of test takers pass). For two years she worked for 200 yuan a month in a state-owned wholesale company, but it went bankrupt. Then she tried a stint behind a sales counter, but no one was buying much in a city with 25 percent unemployment. Finally, a girlfriend from down south wrote to say there was good work at the nightclub.
Free room and board for slaves and whores who work overtime everyday, how repulsive. That's what you get without laws, contracts and free speach. Surely our trade with such an economy is dragging us down more than it's lifting them up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.