overseas manufacturing in developing countries

i know, i was mad jealous

*shot of containers slowly bobbing in the frothy waves, a dim red sun rises in the distance as seagulls circle listlessly*

*cut to shot of kids in newsie caps gunning BMW motorbikes up and off dunes, doing flips*

iirc the cops blocked the beach off after a day or so cos people were travelling from all over the country to grab what they cd get

I wld like to make one trip on a container ship before peak oil makes it unreasonable. think of the photos

always wanted to be a sailor when i was a kid, dunno why i didn't follow that thru. wish i had.

'sailor' isn't really a job anymore tbh

i know :(

just a casual hitcher then, live on the containers, never touch land :D

full-time stowaway, an alright gig but the pay isn't all that

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.

― dayo, Friday, 7 October 2011 17:44 (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is a real poetic post, transit logistics thread or no

a low, full and orange moon over the silent north sea with no land in sight is something to remember

tho tbf we were chucking dead mackerel over the side at the time iirc

I know someone whose dad was a merchant marine until retirement, and now her brother is one, too. Weird life imo.

Also you can get a passenger berth on a container ship, it's just kind of weird, I think, to be a passenger when everyone else is working. For days and days and days.

yeah i remember years ago there was some kind of website that helped you book passage on various merchant ships, iirc u cd pitch in with the work and get the ride even cheaper that way

it sounds like something out of graham greene really, hitching a ride on a working vessel

a man could get paid for an honest day's work

I have to confess that I find giant container ships filled with containers extremely beautiful

I think a lot of people do! you can post to my other thread

sublime machinery

esp maersk ships

http://vimeo.com/27982653

x-posted in steve jobs thread

2 days and nobody has called out the word "jumboisation" yet!

Great thread btw!

I did look twice at that word! Is it a word?

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

Did they really need to coin a new word for this?

Yeah, embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word after all.

guess it would be remiss to not mention the serious flooding in thailand. I've heard that some of the companies are donating money to flood relief - hope that that extends to all the companies who own plants there

huge lol:

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/11/08/us_military_riddled_with_shanzhai_p.php

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

bit of controversy about a company providing official toys for the london olympics on the news, manufactured in china @ 26p per hour etc.

it was a lazy and stupid report, tbph, but relevant to thread

CNY break in full swing now. Meaning absolutely no production or inspections on the China end this week-- a veritable vacation at my desk...

Haha for me it just means we're rush-manufacturing everything domestically, especially with the ALA awards this morning bearing fruit for us. Now I get to proof pages like a maniac and POSSIBLY go on press in Wisconsin. Fingers crossed!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

― I am that young sis, the beacon, a yardstick (dayo), Sunday, January 22, 2012 2:51 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This article was really good, and also kind of terrifying.

rip America

yeah that was kind of my takeaway. RIP good standard of living anywhere in the world.

All because we want our iPhones YESTERDAY

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

There's your answer America.

http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/globalization-and-the-iphone/

This article was really good, and also kind of terrifying.

OTM. Great article. If the China manufacturing success story was just a matter of lower wages that would be a hopeful sign for the US, because Chinese wages are already rising in real terms, and that will continue. But the really terrifying thing is that it's not mainly about the wages any more - it's about being able to scale quickly and the fact that the supply chains are in Asia now. That makes it that much harder to try to win those jobs back to the US.

krugster also mentions china's advantages in (localized) specialization for certain manufacturing industries

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2012/01/will-the-chinese-turn-against-the-iphone.html

iPhone suicides, believe it or not, are not news to the Chinese. Nobody has done more aggressive reporting on the factory conditions at Foxconn than the Chinese press. Before foreigners noticed, newspapers in eastern and southern China were investigating the deaths of workers and Chinese bloggers were documenting more details about their daily lives than foreign visitors could hope to obtain. It’s one of those examples of how erratic the Chinese world of information is these days: the Chinese press is throttled on many issues, but when it concerns workplace conditions—or, better yet, a factory with a boss in Taiwan—the issue resonates with enough notes from old socialist hymns that it gets reported in astonishing detail.

Things have been even worse. As the columnist Nick Kristof put it in a comment on “This American Life,” “it’s a very awkward thing to defend sweatshops,” but consider the enduring effects of rural poverty: “My wife’s ancestral village is in southern China, not too far from Foxconn. And people in that village went from a really grim kind of lifestyle, basically in the rice paddies. And for them, and indeed for many Chinese, the grimness of factories like Foxconn was better than the grimness of rice paddies.” This doesn’t let Americans off the hook to care about it, but it helps you understand the Chinese view. For an in-depth look at the lives of assembly-line workers in China, consider reading “Factory Girls,” by Leslie Chang.

can't believe this would've happened under humanitarian and philanthropist Steve Jobs' watch

kinda just wondering what was worse about rice paddies than foxconn, not rhetorically

prob the same amount of labor or more for much less in return

I know amurricans are all "50 cents an hour??? omg!" but all in all the average foxconn salary is not that much lower than the average college graduate's salary in china, sadly

gonna repost this, documentary made about foxconn migrant workers

http://vimeo.com/27982653

Sure. I would imagine that it's much more about the prospect of higher wages = save/send money home = upward mobility (or at least the perception of it) rather than "working in a foxconn factory is easier" which I don't buy.

i can believe working indoors in a factory for long hours under intense pressure is better than the physical grind of working in a paddy tbh

have you ever worked on a farm, hurting?

Working indoors for long hours under intense pressure inhaling chemicals that lead to your hands shaking uncontrollably, fwiw

and I can tell an equally harsh story about working from dawn til nightfall outside under a harsh beating sun just to come home to even more destitute conditions. what's your point?