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$0.33 per shirt, anywhere in the world, is nearly as cheap as the cheapest sweatshop markets. I expect most commentary will look at this using a US vs China th

$0.33 per shirt, anywhere in the world, is nearly as cheap as the cheapest sweatshop markets. I expect most commentary will look at this using a US vs China thing, but I'm more worried about SE Asia and Africa. They need to climb up the development ladder that China's already 1/2-way up. Say what you will about clothing and sneaker sweatshops, but they were a tried and tested method for building up the basics of an industrial economy. South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong wouldn't have gotten to where they are today as quickly without them. How will Kenya develop?

Overtonwindow 9y ago
What do you think will be the industry that shifts from China to SE Asia and Africa? I feel like clothing is the likeliest because of it's relative simplicity, compared to other things.
dannysu 9y ago
Not sure how accurate. I think clothing has already moved away from China. I have shirts made in Bangladesh. And according to [1], workers get paid $0.12 per shirt. Like you said, $0.33 vs $0.12 is super close it seems. [1]: http://www.ecouterre.com/infographic-how-much-does-that-14-t-shirt-really-cost/
- Symbiote 9y ago
  The article says the cost in Bangladesh is 22 cents. That is surely close enough, after taking into account transport and lead time, that factories in Bangladesh should be worried.
  - HillaryBriss 9y ago
    how much will the human labor cost per shirt be once these automatic t-shirt machines are moved to Bangladesh?
    - bmcusick 9y ago
      Robot production lines need robot technicians to support them. I doubt you'll find many of those in Bangladesh any time soon.
      - HillaryBriss 9y ago
        eventually though. there are, no doubt, some very skillful, very resourceful sewing machine repair techs there. i guess that time window is how long the automatic t-shirt making business remains viable in the US.
      - photojosh 9y ago
        IIRC most of the world's hard drives are made in Thailand, not too far away. They found them somewhere. :) And one robot replaces 17 workers, it's probably around 1 robot tech to support 10-20 machines. According to these stats [1], in Bangladesh there's 4800 factories with around 725 workers on average. So that would be 40 machines with one worker each to supervise and 3-4 robot techs. 5 people to replace 725! [1] http://www.waronwant.org/sweatshops-bangladesh http://www.waronwant.org/sweatshops-bangladesh
    - joeyo 9y ago
      Why will the machines need to be located in Bangladesh? Cheaper repairmen?
      - HillaryBriss 9y ago
        i was just thinking like some business owner might: let's try to lower costs in every possible way, including labor.
        andrewjl 9y ago
        The owner will be balancing those costs against the cost of shipping and extra logistics overhead for goods destined to North America or Europe.
    - 9y ago
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
I don't see this as bad. Being able to manufacture simple things just increases how complex things can be for a certain cost. CNC and automated process control isn't killing Asian metalworking.
- bmcusick 9y ago
  Economies need to meet a certain level of development in order to "move up the value chain" rather than just get left behind. I'm confident China has that. I'd be worried about Indonesia or Kenya.
ams6110 9y ago
Kenya hasn't developed yet, why do we think it will? Putting it another way, Kenya's development has not been held back by lack of sweatshops but by corrupt government and misguided go-gooderism.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > by lack of sweatshops but by corrupt government I think this is a false contrast. Stable government and reliable infrastructure are the standard requirements for building factories (sweatshop or otherwise) in a country. So a lack of industrialization is frequently a consequence of bad governance. Notably, corruption itself isn't an issue. China, for instance, has plenty of corrupt and autocratic governance. But it has predictable, tolerable corruption and a basically-stable political structure, however the specifics may change. What's important is that the situation was predictable; everyone was willing to skim a percentage and leave the basic structures of government intact. If investors were worried that the government might take 100% of an investment, or fall completely, the situation would look pretty different.
  - pm90 9y ago
    Excellent point. If you look at China, they took a long time to get to a state where they could start developing reliably. Basically after the fall of the Monarchy, there were revolution after revolution, until the Communist takeover. Even after, it took much later, until the rise of Deng Xiaoping, for development to actually take place. By that time, the State had effectively established itself as the Supreme political power (albeit a non-democratic one) which lead to the stability that allowed massive industrialization to take place rapidly, often with assistance from the State.
- sekou 9y ago
  While growth has slowed in recent years, 6 of the world's 10 fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa from 2000 to 2010 (https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_chart https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_cha... ). While Kenya isn't included among those countries it has also shown robust growth. It may be that this growth is unfairly geared toward the wealthiest Africans but I think you'd find that the life of the average Kenyan has improved markedly in the last 20 years.
otakucode 9y ago
Tech is cheap and ubiquitous. Perhaps people in SE Asia and Africa might want to invest in a T-shirt sewing robot and an Internet connection such that they can run absolute circles around every major developed-world company by keeping their overhead low. Those multi-hundred-million-dollar CEOs from those American (or Chinese) companies are a tremendous drain. And that's not even to mention their absurd gigantic office complexes which aggressively destroy value at every turn...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- chris_wot 9y ago
  That requires infrastructure. Here's the thing though: if you can do it dirt cheap overseas and cut out labour, then you can do it dirt cheap pretty much anywhere. Offshoring really gets done to reduce costs via cheaper wages. If you take out the wages, then offshoring doesn't look as good as it once was. The issue is that white collar work is now the stuff that gets offshored. But then I see the absolute dire service many outsourced companies provide and I often wonder how much the business loses because of it.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Lots of stuff are made in China due to proximity to resources, not just cheap labor. T-shirts don't qualify, though - the US is actually the largest cotton producer.
    - chris_wot 9y ago
      In that case, Australia should soon have a large manufacturing base.
snrplfth 9y ago
You could say that about basically every labour-saving device though. Tractors, earth-moving equipment, container ships, whatever. And even textiles are almost wholly automated now - lots of textiles are grown or spun, woven, dyed and printed almost entirely by automated machines - robots, in effect. Final assembly is in many cases the first time a given piece of textile has been touched by human hands. So why is the automation of this final step going to be the thing that prevents countries from climbing the "development ladder"? When cellphones became affordable, it didn't mean that countries without decent landline networks couldn't "move up the ladder". They just jumped straight to the more advanced technology. If higher-productivity technologies are available, and are cheaper than using scarce human labour, then you use it. More productivity is not somehow a bad thing.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I'm not convinced this point carries. Sure, "lump of labor" is a fallacy, more productivity is not likely to drive massive unemployment. But that doesn't mean all labor is interchangeably easy in all environments. Competition is still possible. Early tractors didn't do much for underdeveloped nations. Mainframe computers didn't either. The default state of capital-intensive technology is to improve productivity, but not to bring capital and work into underdeveloped nations. Whatever benefits accrue there are the diffuse rewards of expanding global production. The economic boom in China, Taiwan, etc was something vastly more specific than "rising labor productivity". Container ships, telecommunications, (Western labor laws,) and efficient but labor-intensive production came together to make offshoring incredibly profitable. The boom wasn't just rising productivity, it was a confluence of incentives that made production in certain countries much more attractive than others. We didn't just make more things, we closed factories in the West and reopened them in China. If the next wave of productivity gains is high-capital, high-tech, low-labor, we'll probably see the reverse happen. People will engage in production where they can get extremely stable infrastructure (including internet), skilled labor, and precision parts. Factories in countries with cheap labor but unreliable power and internet might well close in favor of more production in countries like South Korea or even America. That won't be the end of the world, productivity will still rise, but it might end the specific forces that have caused so much growth via mass production.
Fezzik 9y ago
The Economist just had a great article about the process of moving a poor country up the ladder, focusing on Bangladesh. I thought it was a good read, and it touches on the roll of textile manufacturing and the related infrastructure that helps boost an economy. https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565617-bangladesh-has-dysfunctional-politics-and-stunted-private-sector-yet-it-has-been-surprisingly https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565617-bangladesh-...
mankash666 9y ago
Kenya will develop by investing in it's people's education and economy. Sweatshop as a vehicle of development is like "war for peace"
QAPereo 9y ago
Add this to the story about Nike funding and now deploying robots as well, and the economic impact could be really huge. It may help the West though...
nols 9y ago
That $0.33 is cost of human labor, the article doesn't mention how much the technology contributes to the cost of the clothing.
- puranjay 9y ago
  More importantly, what will you save on shipping and how much more could you make by marking the t-shirt up as "made in America"? What are the long-term brand benefits of being American-made?
rtpg 9y ago
considering the low price of the shirts, how do you cover the capital costs of the robots? I'm having a hard time imagining the robots putting out 6 digits-worth of shirts per robot to cover the costs?
- amelius 9y ago
  Perhaps they can focus on customization, and sell more expensive shirts?
vorotato 9y ago
Well we could react to abundance in a non-imperialist way...

Overtonwindow 9y ago

What do you think will be the industry that shifts from China to SE Asia and Africa? I feel like clothing is the likeliest because of it's relative simplicity, compared to other things.

dannysu 9y ago

Not sure how accurate. I think clothing has already moved away from China. I have shirts made in Bangladesh. And according to [1], workers get paid $0.12 per shirt. Like you said, $0.33 vs $0.12 is super close it seems. [1]: http://www.ecouterre.com/infographic-how-much-does-that-14-t-shirt-really-cost/

Symbiote 9y ago
The article says the cost in Bangladesh is 22 cents. That is surely close enough, after taking into account transport and lead time, that factories in Bangladesh should be worried.
- HillaryBriss 9y ago
  how much will the human labor cost per shirt be once these automatic t-shirt machines are moved to Bangladesh?
  - bmcusick 9y ago
    Robot production lines need robot technicians to support them. I doubt you'll find many of those in Bangladesh any time soon.
    - HillaryBriss 9y ago
      eventually though. there are, no doubt, some very skillful, very resourceful sewing machine repair techs there. i guess that time window is how long the automatic t-shirt making business remains viable in the US.
    - photojosh 9y ago
      IIRC most of the world's hard drives are made in Thailand, not too far away. They found them somewhere. :) And one robot replaces 17 workers, it's probably around 1 robot tech to support 10-20 machines. According to these stats [1], in Bangladesh there's 4800 factories with around 725 workers on average. So that would be 40 machines with one worker each to supervise and 3-4 robot techs. 5 people to replace 725! [1] http://www.waronwant.org/sweatshops-bangladesh http://www.waronwant.org/sweatshops-bangladesh
  - joeyo 9y ago
    Why will the machines need to be located in Bangladesh? Cheaper repairmen?
    - HillaryBriss 9y ago
      i was just thinking like some business owner might: let's try to lower costs in every possible way, including labor.
      - andrewjl 9y ago
        The owner will be balancing those costs against the cost of shipping and extra logistics overhead for goods destined to North America or Europe.
  - 9y ago

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

I don't see this as bad. Being able to manufacture simple things just increases how complex things can be for a certain cost. CNC and automated process control isn't killing Asian metalworking.

bmcusick 9y ago
Economies need to meet a certain level of development in order to "move up the value chain" rather than just get left behind. I'm confident China has that. I'd be worried about Indonesia or Kenya.

ams6110 9y ago

Kenya hasn't developed yet, why do we think it will? Putting it another way, Kenya's development has not been held back by lack of sweatshops but by corrupt government and misguided go-gooderism.

Bartweiss 9y ago
> by lack of sweatshops but by corrupt government I think this is a false contrast. Stable government and reliable infrastructure are the standard requirements for building factories (sweatshop or otherwise) in a country. So a lack of industrialization is frequently a consequence of bad governance. Notably, corruption itself isn't an issue. China, for instance, has plenty of corrupt and autocratic governance. But it has predictable, tolerable corruption and a basically-stable political structure, however the specifics may change. What's important is that the situation was predictable; everyone was willing to skim a percentage and leave the basic structures of government intact. If investors were worried that the government might take 100% of an investment, or fall completely, the situation would look pretty different.
- pm90 9y ago
  Excellent point. If you look at China, they took a long time to get to a state where they could start developing reliably. Basically after the fall of the Monarchy, there were revolution after revolution, until the Communist takeover. Even after, it took much later, until the rise of Deng Xiaoping, for development to actually take place. By that time, the State had effectively established itself as the Supreme political power (albeit a non-democratic one) which lead to the stability that allowed massive industrialization to take place rapidly, often with assistance from the State.
sekou 9y ago
While growth has slowed in recent years, 6 of the world's 10 fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa from 2000 to 2010 (https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_chart https://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_cha... ). While Kenya isn't included among those countries it has also shown robust growth. It may be that this growth is unfairly geared toward the wealthiest Africans but I think you'd find that the life of the average Kenyan has improved markedly in the last 20 years.

otakucode 9y ago

Tech is cheap and ubiquitous. Perhaps people in SE Asia and Africa might want to invest in a T-shirt sewing robot and an Internet connection such that they can run absolute circles around every major developed-world company by keeping their overhead low. Those multi-hundred-million-dollar CEOs from those American (or Chinese) companies are a tremendous drain. And that's not even to mention their absurd gigantic office complexes which aggressively destroy value at every turn...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chris_wot 9y ago
That requires infrastructure. Here's the thing though: if you can do it dirt cheap overseas and cut out labour, then you can do it dirt cheap pretty much anywhere. Offshoring really gets done to reduce costs via cheaper wages. If you take out the wages, then offshoring doesn't look as good as it once was. The issue is that white collar work is now the stuff that gets offshored. But then I see the absolute dire service many outsourced companies provide and I often wonder how much the business loses because of it.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Lots of stuff are made in China due to proximity to resources, not just cheap labor. T-shirts don't qualify, though - the US is actually the largest cotton producer.
  - chris_wot 9y ago
    In that case, Australia should soon have a large manufacturing base.

snrplfth 9y ago

You could say that about basically every labour-saving device though. Tractors, earth-moving equipment, container ships, whatever. And even textiles are almost wholly automated now - lots of textiles are grown or spun, woven, dyed and printed almost entirely by automated machines - robots, in effect. Final assembly is in many cases the first time a given piece of textile has been touched by human hands. So why is the automation of this final step going to be the thing that prevents countries from climbing the "development ladder"? When cellphones became affordable, it didn't mean that countries without decent landline networks couldn't "move up the ladder". They just jumped straight to the more advanced technology. If higher-productivity technologies are available, and are cheaper than using scarce human labour, then you use it. More productivity is not somehow a bad thing.

Bartweiss 9y ago
I'm not convinced this point carries. Sure, "lump of labor" is a fallacy, more productivity is not likely to drive massive unemployment. But that doesn't mean all labor is interchangeably easy in all environments. Competition is still possible. Early tractors didn't do much for underdeveloped nations. Mainframe computers didn't either. The default state of capital-intensive technology is to improve productivity, but not to bring capital and work into underdeveloped nations. Whatever benefits accrue there are the diffuse rewards of expanding global production. The economic boom in China, Taiwan, etc was something vastly more specific than "rising labor productivity". Container ships, telecommunications, (Western labor laws,) and efficient but labor-intensive production came together to make offshoring incredibly profitable. The boom wasn't just rising productivity, it was a confluence of incentives that made production in certain countries much more attractive than others. We didn't just make more things, we closed factories in the West and reopened them in China. If the next wave of productivity gains is high-capital, high-tech, low-labor, we'll probably see the reverse happen. People will engage in production where they can get extremely stable infrastructure (including internet), skilled labor, and precision parts. Factories in countries with cheap labor but unreliable power and internet might well close in favor of more production in countries like South Korea or even America. That won't be the end of the world, productivity will still rise, but it might end the specific forces that have caused so much growth via mass production.

Fezzik 9y ago

The Economist just had a great article about the process of moving a poor country up the ladder, focusing on Bangladesh. I thought it was a good read, and it touches on the roll of textile manufacturing and the related infrastructure that helps boost an economy. https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565617-bangladesh-has-dysfunctional-politics-and-stunted-private-sector-yet-it-has-been-surprisingly https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565617-bangladesh-...

mankash666 9y ago

Kenya will develop by investing in it's people's education and economy. Sweatshop as a vehicle of development is like "war for peace"

QAPereo 9y ago

Add this to the story about Nike funding and now deploying robots as well, and the economic impact could be really huge. It may help the West though...

nols 9y ago

That $0.33 is cost of human labor, the article doesn't mention how much the technology contributes to the cost of the clothing.

puranjay 9y ago
More importantly, what will you save on shipping and how much more could you make by marking the t-shirt up as "made in America"? What are the long-term brand benefits of being American-made?

rtpg 9y ago

considering the low price of the shirts, how do you cover the capital costs of the robots? I'm having a hard time imagining the robots putting out 6 digits-worth of shirts per robot to cover the costs?

amelius 9y ago
Perhaps they can focus on customization, and sell more expensive shirts?

vorotato 9y ago

Well we could react to abundance in a non-imperialist way...