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While the author may be perceived as anti-capitalist this is actually a very good read. These topics are critical for understanding how your costs add up, who p

by AJ007 12y ago

While the author may be perceived as anti-capitalist this is actually a very good read. These topics are critical for understanding how your costs add up, who pays them, and where the margins come from. I am surprised it didn't get more votes. The author's claim is that labor costs are being pushed down, suppressed and hidden from public view. Yet if we examine a time series Chinese labor costs, the price inflation over the past 13 years is phenomenal: http://imgur.com/rkEOiPj http://imgur.com/rkEOiPj Even if workers are not being compensated the full amount they are owed, the competition for labor means they are being paid a great deal more (3x-8x) than they would have been paid in 2001. If we accounted for inflation, it isn't as much but still there. I strongly agree with the hidden & unpaid value of environmental pollution. The author also should mention the hidden value captured by China's artificially low interest rates and other government expenditures. I also did not notice anything about confiscation of land. Plenty of problems with a supply chain involving countries where citizens have minimal to no rights. Certainly it should be a concern for Apple and other companies as China re-balances (today's Hong Kong protests perhaps just a tremor of what is to come.)

scarmig 12y ago
Other points I found particularly interesting: The author argues that this surplus extracted value doesn't end up primarily in Apple's pockets, but in consumer's. The author incorporates the concept of "reproductive labor" as an unpriced input, a cost accounting I've not seen before and have some skepticism of but is interesting nonetheless. It tries to account for the extra extracted value that come from hukou restrictions, giving purchasers of their labor some level of monopsony power. Instead of focusing myopically on "proletarians" like most Foxconn diatribes do, the paper also brings up the usually unaddressed issue of exploitation of Chinese management and engineering resources.

by AJ007 12y ago

scarmig 12y ago

Other points I found particularly interesting: The author argues that this surplus extracted value doesn't end up primarily in Apple's pockets, but in consumer's. The author incorporates the concept of "reproductive labor" as an unpriced input, a cost accounting I've not seen before and have some skepticism of but is interesting nonetheless. It tries to account for the extra extracted value that come from hukou restrictions, giving purchasers of their labor some level of monopsony power. Instead of focusing myopically on "proletarians" like most Foxconn diatribes do, the paper also brings up the usually unaddressed issue of exploitation of Chinese management and engineering resources.