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There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor. They claim to be championing labor rights, but they are often just angere
by koheripbal 4y ago
There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor.
They claim to be championing labor rights, but they are often just angered at companies for stopping all manufacturing in the West. They see it as an obvious weakness in their ideology that companies can just walk away from their labor movement and go elsewhere.
The obvious truth, and what literally all of these Vietnamese workers will tell you, is that foreign tech manufacturing is an amazingly better paying job than what is currently available.
The true story with China is that moving Western manufacturing to China raised the standard of living for literally hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty.
- surfpel 4y ago> There is a lot of dishonesty around Westerners complaining about foreign cheap labor. This is a strawman. You're conflating different groups of people with different interests. Some people complain about labor conditions, some people complain that jobs are leaving the country. Almost nobody is "dishonest" about this.
- wbsss4412 4y agoThere are plenty of people who are extremely selective with regards to their outrage on each issue, though.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- atwood22 4y agoSo? Most people's entire existence is predicated on unsustainable consumerism. There is literally too much to care about. If you require that people must care about all issues to care about any issue, then progress won't be made. Maybe that's your intention.
- wbsss4412 4y agoI don’t require everyone to care the same about all issues, that wasn’t my point. My point was people who care about labor rights, shipping jobs offshore, etc are selective about those specific issues. Never said they had to care about other issues.
- atwood22 4y agoThe same type of argument can be made about any specific issue. For instance, labor rights is incredibly broad. I don't think it's a realistic requirement for someone to care about every possible labor-rights issue. It's fine if people want to be selective.
- wbsss4412 4y agoI wasn’t specific enough. My point was that people are inconsistent due to the intersection between their advocacy and their own sense of nationalism. The issues are amplified when they pertain to Americas enemies and lessened when it pertains to Americas Allies.
- tcmart14 4y agoMaybe to help explain what I think you are getting at. A year or two ago, you had senators preaching about how we needed to stop china's slave labor of the uighyurs. Okay, fine, I agree with that. But what about the horrible labor practices American companies rely on in central Africa where there, slavery also exists? The people who say bad China about labor practices have their blinders up to our allies who use the same labor practices. The reality is, if you think a company should not use slave labor in China, you should also thing they shouldnt use slave labor in Africa or Vietnam or any other emerging country/economy/third world country. For a specific example, I did a quick search and Malaysia is one. Malaysia has the same or worst labor practices then China, but no one complains about tech companies relying on Malaysia's poor labor practices. A blog post that talks about it. https://medium.com/swlh/forced-labor-in-tech-c91daf979201 https://medium.com/swlh/forced-labor-in-tech-c91daf979201
- megablast 4y agoEverybody is. Unless there is someone outraged all the time.
- specialist 4y agoOur scarcest commodity is attention.
- upupandup 4y agoThe people complaining on Twitter that foreign cheap labour is being used are writing on devices that were produced by that same labour. Those very same people are the ones that are demanding that we bring those labour back but unwilling to brunt the cost that companies will then pass on to those same customer. It's not a strawman its the reality of Western society, whatever feels wrong is totally and completely detached from any logic or intellectual discussion about why the reality they feel like they are entitled to is at conflict with their own contradictory desires. It is virtue signaling, largely to placate and pat themselves on the back to deflect blame from them, that their consumption, their vote with their money, and unwillingness to pay the true cost, is what creates this situation.
- erichocean 4y ago> but unwilling to brunt the cost that companies will then pass on to those same customer HUGE "citation needed" here. Apple did a study years ago (when Obama was President) and the cost to manufacture iPhones in the US was well under 10% of the total cost, by their own calculations. The cost of labor in China has only gotten worse since then (hence the move to Vietnam in the OP).
- upupandup 4y ago> years ago No longer the case obviously but more importantly, Apple studied themselves and found they were only saving 10% in costs? This makes no sense lol
- lancesells 4y ago10% is many billions every three months. I don't think it's wise or ethical to manufacture in countries that have human rights violations but there's nothing ethical about a corporation.
- sneak 4y agoWhere do you propose that Apple move their Texas plant then? (The US, like China, also runs concentration camps. As far as I can tell there is no country on Earth that uniformly preserves human rights.)
- chrischen 4y ago99% chance the people complaining about labor conditions are doing so on a made in China phone. Let’s be honest, people complaining about labor conditions have a pretty weak understanding of economics and what is actually going on with regards to these factories. China isn’t stupid. They weaken their currency specifically to bring in the cheap labor jobs to lift the poorest to a slightly less poor tier. Unless you realize how poor they started out with it’s hard to appreciate the gains in wealth even if it still looks dirt poor to an armchair labor rights activist.
- tomxor 4y ago> 99% chance the people complaining about labor conditions are doing so on a made in China phone. 99% of everyone has a phone made in China, does this mean it's not possible to complain about the state of the world we live in?
- sneak 4y agoNot while you are literally voting with your dollars to preserve that status quo.
- chrischen 4y agoEspecially when said iPhone assemblers aren't even complaining about their work conditions as much as some clueless American... if one is going to complain, complain about one's own conditions, or something one actually knows about...
- tomxor 4y agoIt's not a vote if there is practically only one option.
- surfpel 4y ago> have a weak understanding of economics Economists hardly understand the economy, so I’d say they’re in good company… Jokes aside, demanding better treatment of workers and onshoring of jobs doesn’t seem as insane as people here are making it seem? This whole thread feels kind of irrelevant.
- baybal2 4y ago95% of Vietnamese support capitalism: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/13/vietnam-capitalism-global-post/70261770/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/13/vietnam-... thus making it the most capitalist country in the world... Second in line is Bangladesh P.S. USA had a capitalism approval around 70% in the same survey.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- FpUser 4y agoWhen I cam to Canada from the USSR in the beginning of 90s people at place where I worked were telling me that I am more of a capitalist that they were.
- hindsightbias 4y agoThey won the war. Just took Americans awhile to accept that.
- james4k 4y agoThat survey's execution is questionable https://twitter.com/LunaOi_VN/status/1485985258302742528 https://twitter.com/LunaOi_VN/status/1485985258302742528
- Aunche 4y agoIf you want to decrease inequality, it would make sense for people to be compensated for reducing inequality. This is what exactly what outsourcing is.
- erichocean 4y agoOutsourcing has dramatically increased inequality in the United States. Try again.
- Aunche 4y agoWhy should we have to care about American workers over everyone else? On one side, you have a American factory worker loses the ability to buy steak. On the other, a Vietnamese worker gets access to running water, the consumer gets cheaper electronics and Apple shareholders get extra profits.
- freddie_mercury 4y agoThe Vietnamese workers already had access to running water. Source: I actually live in Vietnam.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Aunche 4y agoIn cities, sure, but much of Vietnam still lives in rural areas, which still are very underserved. The continued industrialization of Vietnam is indeed enabling more access running water. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in_Vietnam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_...
- rasz 4y agoWho do you think is the we here? Because usually the we that is complaining about it are those American factory workers.
- LtWorf 4y agoBut now we can't build anything and if china embargoes us, we're doomed.
- xwdv 4y agoWe produce things that matter, such as food. We’ll be fine.
- LtWorf 4y agoWith no chips to repair the john deere tractors? Yeah food won't happen.
- koheripbal 4y agoWe produce lots of chips now, and soon we're going to be producing enough for ourselves.
- LtWorf 4y agoIf that were true USA wouldn't care about Taiwan.
- _-david-_ 4y agoThere are multiple fabs in the US.
- nyokodo 4y ago> But now we can't build anything and if china embargoes us, we're doomed. Firstly there is vastly more manufacturing in the US, Canada, and Mexico than you appear to realize. Secondly China is far more prone to being embargoed than the United States. If China cut us off then the price of certain goods would increase significantly and there’d be shortages of some goods and industrial inputs but we could feed ourselves, keep the lights on, heat/cool our homes, keep our industry going, and crucially our military capacity would be untouched. China would lose its largest and demographically healthiest consumer market which would vastly deepen its economic hole, lose a huge supplier of food which China can’t do without, and the US navy could interdict all energy shipments to China which would result in the country deindustrializing in a few months after its reserves ran out. Depending on how the embargo was effected it might drag in Japan or India both whose navies could single-handedly cut off China from oil shipments.
- killjoywashere 4y ago> The true story with China is that moving Western manufacturing to China raised the standard of living for literally hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. And thereby strengthened the hand of the CCP.
- koheripbal 4y agoIt's exactly the opposite. People who can afford a good education are harder to control.
- bigcat12345678 4y agoYes, that's why American people are so dumbed down nowadays, intentionally by some people who happened to share this ideology.
- SkyMarshal 4y agoNo it isn't. People with nothing to lose and living in poverty while seeing their democratic neighbors prospering are harder to control. People with education, jobs, and families - something to lose - are easier to control. How many Tienanmen Squares has China had since Asian and Western democracies opened their markets and enriched China.
- qsort 4y agoThis is literally ahistorical. The overwhelming majority of consequential protests/rebellions/revolutions were heavily endorsed by the literati class. Why do you think freedom of speech and expanding education are classically liberal claims? You can see it right now in Putin's Russia. Opposition to the regime, to the extent that it exists, does not come from the proles.
- triactual 4y agoNo, you are exactly backwards. Did the People’s Revolution win or did the students win? I seem to remember that the students were run over by tanks. Probably not being driven by highly educated PLA commanders.
- Zigurd 4y agoAssembly plants are just one kind of manufacturing, albeit a very visible part. Petroleum refining and other chemicals are manufacturing. The US does a lot of that. Manufacturing has been a growing share of GDP for the past few years, interrupted surprisingly briefly by COVID. Just that most of it isn't assembly lines.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoI submitted a thoughtful analysis of this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32214320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32214320
- nyolfen 4y ago> They see it as an obvious weakness in their ideology that companies can just walk away from their labor movement and go elsewhere. it's true! we can't force anybody to use our labor. but we can control access to our markets. you don't have to be a union activist to recognize that exporting american manufacturing jobs has been disastrous for our domestic working class.
- surement 4y ago> you don't have to be a union activist to recognize that exporting american manufacturing jobs has been disastrous for our domestic working class You do though. The reality is that "exporting" these jobs means cheaper products for everyone, and no one in what you call the "working class" wants these jobs to be in the US if it means they need to pay more for everything. The US consistently manufactures more every year despite hiring fewer manufacturing workers because improved automation competes with US labor at lower costs.
- rasz 4y ago>no one in what you call the "working class" wants these jobs to be in the US you might be a little disconnected from reality >if it means they need to pay more for everything. yes, now they can pay a little less from their wage.. oh wait, they got fired
- surement 4y ago> you might be a little disconnected from reality you might be projecting > yes, now they can pay a little less from their wage.. oh wait, they got fired nah, there are plenty of "working class" people who are working
- nyolfen 4y ago> and no one in what you call the "working class" wants these jobs to be in the US if it means they need to pay more for everything. look at a graph of productivity measures since 1990, a graph of real wages, and a graph of US GINI scores. i'm a knowledge economy worker like most people here, but we have been on a course of serious class warfare and economic cannibalism for decades. but thank you for letting us know that everybody actually wants it this way.
- gerdesj 4y agoI can hire a person here (UK) to do something for £x/hour or £y/unit. I can perhaps hire a person in say Vietnam to do something for £x/n/hour etc. I don't do this personally but we should explore the possibilities. The thing about capitalism is it is capitalism. You should drive costs down and profits up. Ideally you don't kill people on the "journey" but hey that's what laws n that jud, errr judiciary ... ... cops/police thing is all about or something. I own a very small company in the UK. We don't go full on capitalism (whatever that monster really is) We strive to be able to sleep at night.
- xupybd 4y agoNZ is where you want to hire remote staff. Our wages are low and so is our dollar. We speak the same language and have a very similar culture. The time zone is an issue but remote workers normally will do strange hours to make it work. The more people do that the better life gets here in NZ so I'm a big fan. Our exports are mainly agricultural and tourism. Neither are high earners.
- caycep 4y agoA few thoughts: -I knew someone who wanted to set up optical and circuit board manufacturing in Vietnam - the few factories they toured seemed to be set up very well. Also frequently with better female/male ratios in management levels (perhaps bc, at least what they were told, Vietnamese culture tends to be more matriarchal than elsewhere). Maybe why also a lot of Japanese electronic makers (Pentax, Nikon) had a bigger presence in Vietnam than expected -the irony of Western manufacturing and standards of living - (coupled w/ strong policy and incentive support from the ccp) is that Xi Jinping seems to be actively going against perhaps one of the greatest economic partnership of recent times, namely USA/China. I think that is why there is likely going to be a contraction in the Chinese economy, if not already happen due to Zero Covid. If anything brings down the emperor/dynasty this time, it is because the grain ceases to flow (at least borrowing a phrase from an undergraduate Chinese history class...)
- xupybd 4y agoChina's economy is in trouble. They've had a few property developers running Ponzi schemes and it's led to small bank runs. The government is propping things up and have massive reserves but it's not a good sign.
- nsonha 4y agoas a Vietnamese, we just laugh when we read about those things, so out of touch with reality. It's very condescending as well, the logic is that developing countries are stupid so whatever deal they negotiate for themself must be at a disadvantage and bad for them. When I read criticism of China in Africa I could not help but asking myself, if these developed countries care so much why don't they invest in Africa so that Africa has choices other than China? The fact is China (and Vietnam mind you) are the very few countries willing to invest in Africa at their own risk. I would not be surprised if one day it's "communist Vietnam"'s turn to be the scapegoat.
- eunos 4y agoFunniest thing is that in the past Westerners were laughing at China for choosing manufacturing while glorifying their so called service economy. Now they are simping over manufacturing jobs. > I would not be surprised if one day it's "communist Vietnam"'s turn to be the scapegoat. Not even "vibrant democratic India" got spared
- hnxx 4y agoThat's true, foreign company, from tech company to manufacture company, all of them provides more friendly working environment than China local companies. The workers in Shanghai Tesla work 12 hours a day, and paid less than 1500$ a month, which might be unacceptable for western labors, but even this is much better than other local car manufacture companies.