overseas manufacturing in developing countries

Ford, GE and Otis Elevator are among companies that have all just recently announced moves of labor back to the US.

Trying to find good articles that are not WSJ-paywalled.

Supposedly some of it is rising labor costs in China (I had a feeling eventually this would happen) and rising transportation/warehousing costs, but there's some speculation it's partly an image thing, especially with a company like Ford.

I guess an assume-a-can-opener economist would argue that this is what's supposed to happen -- the same free market that drives manufacturing overseas should also eventually drive the cost of manufacturing in other countries up and we should move toward some kind of equilibrium. In reality I find it hard to believe that things work that way for a number of reasons.

Well yeah, partly because rising standards of living in China usually just mean pushing things out to even poorer parts of the world.

If fuel goes up, wages gotta go down

assume-a-canopener would then posit that the increased competition for labour would eventually bring up wages, standards in those economies also, tho

A rising tide lifts all container ships!

ha!

Xpost - and yes I am skipping a zillion posts to make a point that has probably already been made loads of times upthread.

yes, it's incredibly exploitative of the workers who under any reasonable standard of fairness shouldn't have to work in what are, by all accounts, pretty horrific conditions.

Horrific conditions are not intirinsic to overseas manufacture. The problem is surely the horrific conditions, not the overseas manufacture. It is probably quite economically advantageous to have overseas manufacturing taking place in reasonable enough conditions, given the pay differentials between po' countries and the first world.

however, the harsh economic and social realities of the country they were born into make it so that these jobs are often their only alternative to an even harsher existence.

this is also a valid point - except in those countries that still have slavery and serfdom, people are free to decide whether working for peanuts in a maquiladora is a better or worse deal than loafing around as a landles agricultural labourer (or whatever); without Foxconn they do not even have that choice.

Campaigns drawning attention to factory conditions that we would consider unacceptable are useful as way of forcing some improvement in those conditions.

Well yeah, partly because rising standards of living in China usually just mean pushing things out to even poorer parts of the world.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, October 7, 2011 8:34 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

Keep in mind there are vast regions of China where these industries have not even happened yet, so it may just mean pushing things to a different, poorer region of China. But that means more distance from those new manufacturing regions to the port and there's those fuel costs again...

Right..

I keep forgetting that maritime transport is probably as important as it's ever been in the history of the world. I guess it just seems like boats belong to the past, or something.

Step off about my boats, Tracer Hand, if that's even your real name.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

^will read that!

boats are kind of a thing iirc

Also. Boats crucially important = PIRATES super important.

i've seen them

haven't been good in years

I have that book! Did not finish. Should give it another go.

Container ships being unloaded every day practically across the street from my office, at the Port of Cleveland.

container ships use the lowest grade diesel fuel too, right? huge polluters

read that maersk was building a few more ships that are gonna break the world record for biggest container ships

once a big boat dumped a bunch of shipping containers off the coast of rhode island in a huge storm and for months afterwards mocassins and little teddy bears would come ashore shopping wet and salty

Container ports/yards FASCINATE me. I could sit and watch Elizabeth, NJ for hours.

http://www.porttechnology.org/news/maersk_to_build_10_of_the_worlds_largest_ever_container_ships

current list of world's biggest:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ships

so the new ones are gonna have 30% more capacity than the current ones. O_o

laurel if you ever visit hong kong, go here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwai_Tsing_Container_Terminals

i love those humongo cranes

Wire season two IMO

there's a bus that runs on a highway parallel to the container yard in HK - you feel like it just goes on for miles

I can't go to HK/Shenzhen/China due to my chronic health issues, which sucks because my job would happily send me there in a hot minute and I would be psyched to go.

xp My books go there!!!!!

Do I even have to tell you how much I loved Season 2 of The Wire?

I mean I don't, right?

Rangy tough-guy dockworkers AND shipping container tracking software? Clear Laurel-bait.

grew up around ports and trawlers, not the worst place for bumming around as a 12 yr old

there's a really good BBC 4 doc about container ships, which might be, uh obtainable somehow, called "The Box That Changed Britain" ... talks a lot about the old culture of the docks and how that basically vanished overnight, how nobody besides port computers have any idea what's in any of the containers, how shipping costs have made it more cost-effective to farm, say, prawns in the UK, ship them to thailand for processing, then ship them back for sale to the UK public

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Comparison_knock_nevis_with_other_large_buildings.png

mother of god!

http://i.imgur.com/4IKPA.jpg

http://www.ships-info.info/design/knock_nevis_tug.jpg

That graphic is amaaazing

"an empire state building's worth of party poppers gets shipped from shanghai to LA every 2 weeks"

We will try to explain everything about Knock Nevis, or better known as Jahre Viking or Seawise Giant.

Knock Nevis is crazy - on its Wikipedia page it says that it was actually sunk by the Iraqi air force in the Straits of Hormuz, raised from the bottom and repaired, bish bosh!

And renamed Happy Giant after the repair! ;_;

Tugboat captains = balls of steel. Seriously.

must be so weird to spend 6 months at sea on one of these things. a ship the size of the empire state building, and you're part of its 20 man skeleton crew, just walking around between the containers at night, listening to the ocean.

lol

The shipyard exercised its right to sell the vessel and a deal was brokered with Hong Kong Orient Overseas Container Line founder C. Y. Tung to lengthen the ship by several metres and add 156,000 metric tons of cargo capacity through jumboisation. Two years later she was relaunched as Seawise Giant.

IT'S NOT BIG ENOUGH, GODDAMMIT

more cost-effective to farm, say, prawns in the UK, ship them to thailand for processing, then ship them back

Stuff like this is almost reassuring, like there's a lot of fat to be cut. I'll try to resist the temptation to be reassured.

Yeah I can't overstate how interesting it's going to be to see how these matrices revise themselves as fuel gets more and more costly.

Sales departments everywhere will be THRILLED because they won't have to figure 6 weeks' shipping lead times into their sales forecasts.

there also will be fewer sales

Pretty sure the natural relationship between those two phenomena won't even occur to them.

Anyone know how much it costs to truck an 18-wheeler's worth of goods from, say, Mississippi to NY today vs. 20 years ago?