overseas manufacturing in developing countries

spinning this off from the steve jobs thread. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. over the years I've vacillated between the two poles. 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. 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.

~discuss~

There's one thing worse than being exploited, and that's not being exploited.

first naive proposition: one would imagine that the parent company could enforce a certain level of employee rights, health and safety, pay and conditions that would be considerably better than the average for the country of manufacture, whilst still leaving manufacturing costs far lower than they wd be in the West.

a shitty job in america isn't necessarily a shitty job in, well, ireland, for a start.

second naive proposition: one would imagine that it really shouldn't be necessary for parent companies to collude with undemocratic or authoritarian regimes to deny union rights and basic protections to their employees.

And lower their profits for the next annual report? That would be illegal!

http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2010/07/14/hellish-work-0

third naive proposition: allowing for relative standards of living and expectations in different countries and cultures, we could probably arrive at a set of rules which would represent the minimum tolerable conditions for people to be expected to work under, and we could probably attempt to legislate for adoption of these minimum standards by any company that wants to do business in our own

this is all predicated on "if we as a society and our political class gave one shit about people from a different country to us" you understand. which is probably naive proposition number 4.

and having said that, the answer clearly isn't to simply take away employment from developing countries. there needs to be political will to engage with developing countries in ways which improve on total exploitation.

the abolition of the slave trade was apparently unthinkable at one point in time.

agreement of a worldwide minimum standard of employment conditions is the dream fix, but i mean.....

failing that, first world govts having hard and fast standards for worldwide working conditions in companies that wish to operate in that first world market. Again, tough to pin this down as a working tactic.

Companies signing up to a global charter overseen and regulated by i dunno the WHO or similar probably as good as can be hoped, is there anything like this?

'Fair trade' banner etc prob a reasonable working attempt for now, also?

well setting aside the difficulties of enforcing any "legislation" at a global level, individual countries setting standards within their own jurisdictions - including for companies that source labour outside those jurisdictions - is marginally more achievable. however much of a nightmare policing such legislation might be. but a start's a start.

perhaps the Fair Trade guys, or other interested NGOs, shd consider campaigning for that kind of legislation

worth imho noting that every country that has humane working regulations went through a period of industrialization when they had none - which is not at all to say that thats the best way to do things

that's a given. you could argue that those inhumane conditions during industrialization didn't happen with a context of higher ethical standards existing outside the industrializing nations, nor were they a result of wilful exploitation by countries whose own citizens wouldn't tolerate those conditions.

yeah true there is prob a unique opportunity there

as a counter-example, slavery had undoubtedly existed within the British Isles hundreds of years before the 18th century, but was considered intolerable within the United Kingdom for generations during which British businessmen engaged in and exploited the slave trade overseas.

its true, also hitler existed

:|

lol anyway there are some v bad working conditions that could prob be accurately described as slavery and there are some that prob dont meet osha standards thatre really not that bad - i guess its a question of whats acceptable under the circumstances

It's funny there's a convention for humane treatment of 'captured' enemy personnel in wartime, but for employment it's basically "go'hed"...

yeah im sure a lot of it is turning a blind eye, people just dont want to know

i myself have in fact engaged in this behavior it occurs to me

i'm sure it's a broad picture and like i said the last thing that wd help anybody is wholesale removal of employment from developing nations. but since the worst employers are also often companies that do a lot of business in the West, we have the possibility of campaigning for improved conditions for workers who'd be endangering their families' lives if they attempted to campaign themselves.

i mean, dan said "discuss", so i guess i'm saying we shd probably be applying a lot more pressure on our governments to control businesses inasmuch as we're able.

i think also direct pressure on companies who exploit workers

i think part of the point of government is to step in because as individuals we are gonna buy cheap overseas-manufactured goods, and aside from the morality of that it simply isn't as effective to try and get everybody to constantly research who the "good" and "bad" employers are and boycott the bad guys consistently. legislation and policing wd at least be an improvement on that.

xp but direct pressure can be part of that, sure

we've just done some kind of "ethical consumering" thread right? don't want to inject that argument here, but i don't think it's trolling to say that it'll only ever be a small minority of consumers who put direct pressure onto companies in that way

occurs to me that the legislative approach is prob trickier than it seems, like how far back in the supply chain do you hold companies responsible - everything is connected ~man~

i don't think it's trolling to say that it'll only ever be a small minority of consumers who put direct pressure onto companies in that way

― Dios mio! This kid is FUN to hit! (Noodle Vague), Thursday, October 6, 2011 9:42 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

feel like ive seen some successful public shaming on this issue before, but yeah its not gonna work as a comprehensive approach

legislative approach is far from a panacea, but i think it might be a necessary push in the right direction. some companies will always break embargoes, but governments can make it effectively cheaper for medium to large businesses to work within the law than not.

yeah i agree i was just musing on the logistics of the thing

Hey, guys! There are already some global labor standards in place for different industries. I don't know about any of them except printing/binding, but we haven't used any companies who don't comply with our chosen standard for maybe a decade. (I'll remember the name of the standards organization in a sec.)

k i did not know that. how's does it work?

Could a global living wage pull us out of this recession?

http://blogs.ft.com/economistsforum/2011/07/a-global-minimum-wage-system/

yeah, how d'you trace that from one shell company to another holding firm owning several very nasty indian subsidiaries or whatever? Forensic analysis is expensive and it's hard to prove the links in a lot of cases, i mean

Xxxxxp this is pretty much the same subject as the 'individual consumer' thread, tho jho, even if ahem u didn't respond to me on that thread just sayin

Well, there's a regulating body (International Standards Organization = ISO) who gives tests and visits plants to inspect conditions, and plants have to achieve certain standards, including health & safety, labor conditions, living conditions for on-site personnel, etc. If they don't pass them but the deviation is small, they get another chance in like the next 6 month period.

P much factories know that they're either within shooting distance of the rules, so they clean up a few areas of compliance and they're in, or they're not interested because their customers won't care.

But it's pretty uncool as a highly visible commercial enterprise NOT to care, like, I make books for children, so if child labor were being used to make them, that would be a) indefensible and b) terrible for business! For instance, Disney has one of the strongest sets of standards in the entire Asian manufacturing business; if a facility has been DISNEY-approved, you know you're safe to send work there.

sry im a lil behind on that one! xp

a global minimum wage would be based on what? Cost of living locally? That's pretty much what exists now, just that some countries are at an earlier stage of industrial development.

Or some nominal baseline income? How could you even start to set that?

darraghmac, people have been thinking about the answers to those questions for a long time. if you read the article i linked you'll see that guy proposes a percentage (say half) of a country's median wage. which is not that difficult to calculate.

eh, i should come kinda clean here, tho it's gonna hurt my ilxmage.

Before i finished college i'd already interviewed for and secured a job as product manager for a decent sized local firm that sourced and imported a fairly large range of products from eg china, india and rebranded them for sale in ireland (and further afield iirc). It was a pretty shit-hot gig, flights round the world to be wooed by sellers, five star hotels and banquets and a few nudged references to kickbacks etc while you were out there. Ms mac was delighted.

From day one it was pretty clear that the firm didn't give two shits about working conditions of suppliers, so after a few days of wrangling with the options of 'doesn't bother anyone else here man up' or 'this sucks' i quit.

I am a bleeding heart lefty.

xp sorry tracer, i'm ilxing on the phone so i'm not throwing the article aside, i won't get a chance to read til later is all.

I mean yeah i could stay out of the debate til then but that won't make work go any quicker now will it

lol outed yrself

don't get excited i still hate minorities and women

hooray :D

No reason why the UK govt couldn't legislate on the same princple as they have done with the recent Bribery Act - if you fail to comply with x or do y anywhere in the world, then you're guilty in the UK.

Bribery act has many people who do business outside The West not knowing how the hell they'll be able to run their businesses but.

i'm no expert, but how does that work re: jurisdiction etc?

I think the re-branding part of darra's experience is a key to what kind of company takes labor standard precautions: if you put out the products under your own brand AND are responsible for the manufacturing, there's a direct line that's very traceable to your brand reputation. In that case, you just make the higher standards part of the added value your product offers to consumers--the assuaging of whatever consumer guilt/reassurance that you are consuming "responsibly" blah blah see other thread.

this is why I love ILX - you can get up to speed on the current levels of thinking about an issue in 40 posts flat.

I'm pretty disturbed by how quickly companies move to transfer their operations as soon as their is a hint of rising standards or wages or demand for rights in a country. makes it hard for the country in which the factories are in to enforce anything - the companies jump ship as soon as they get shook.

related note, someone who works in japan told me that companies have been using the earthquake/tsunami as an opportunity to move manufacturing off shore - previously it would have been too politically incorrect or culturally frowned upon to do so outright, but hey now that they're destroyed and we're gonna spend the money anyway let's do it in vietnam.

yeah, that's smart.

my company moved their manufacturing overseas to dongguan in the oughties. they built their factory to western standards as far as cleanliness and safety, with special accommodations to local customs, e.g. attached dormitories with a library. I've been there, it's a nice facility. it lowered the cost of manufacture greatly and our company would likely not be around right now if they hadn't made the move to reduce product costs. it also provided jobs for folks in china and contributed to the rising standard of living in the area. so it can be a win-win situation for everyone involved if the ones holding the purse strings act humanely.

everyone except those made redundant in the original country!

Tho tbh i think you have to be realistic about retention of manufacturing jobs in highly developed economies.

sure i've said this before but there's a lot of irony in watching UK workers - clad head to toe in v. cheaply manufactured clothes mostly from Asia - campaigning against jobs going to people from other EU countries or manufacturing being sourced abroad. not calling anybody an idiot, i just think the realities of how a globalised economy works are lost on a lot of people

it's an interesting dynamic, the balance btwn protectionism (bad) and 'buying local (good), between paying an unnecessary premium for goods made in rip-off ireland/britain (bad) vs paying a justifiable premium for higher quality/ethically sourced goods, and that stuff's pretty much the least of the micro-level stuff you could ponder on here

course this is what you get for paying huge money to send every sod to university, suddenly every fucker's too good to be a binman and bang before you know it you're a high-cost economy wondering how come your 50k call centre job doesn't cover the rent innit brian

there is some good news happening in China at least. thanks to anti-western sentiment, western companies who choose to deal in china often find it politically and thus economically advantageous to hold themselves to at least as high if not higher standard than local companies - to shield themselves from charges of exploitation by the locals.

I've also read (on blogs lol) that companies seeking to build new enterprises are encouraged to build not to what current standards are, but what the standards are likely to be in ten years, because in the long run it'll be cheaper to get it right the first time rather than keep on retrofitting everything to meet ratcheting standards.

still, a lot of cruel shit goes down behind those factory walls

hah darragh we have (american focused) discussion of that in generation limbo: 20-somethings today, debt, unemployment, the questionable value of a college education

everyone except those made redundant in the original country!

well, as I said, those ppl would've been out of work one way or the other, at least they received decent severance packages instead of showing up to a padlocked door one day (the fate of a lot of manufacturing folks in the area unfortunately)

ya i was following that thread early on, but tbh i dunno how comparable ireland's cod-third level sector is to anywhere else, given that we essentially created it on the fly in the past 15 years by treating educational standards like the weimar republic treated german gold reserves

yeah it is strange to think about ireland as a country that has attracted a lot of foreign investment thanks to generous tax breaks and other perks. if you don't mind me asking, how has that played out on a local level? are people getting employed?

strange for me as a damned yankee, I should say

xp yeah ed, granted that's about as much as you can ask for. How's state support/aid for those losing jobs in those circumstances over there? They'd get a course in excel over here, three months later we'd put them down as accountants in our returns to the EU

pleased to see this was online, it might interest you later on darragh

http://www.cvoice.org/CV3gibson.pdf

anarchist Tony Gibson's 1952 pamphlet "Who Will Do the Dirty Work?". not a set of theories to live by probably but a funny, interesting look at issues around low paid jobs, from an era before the "everybody goes to university boom"

speaking as a dude that sells lots of imported stuff, part of the problem is that most of the super cheap products change factories constantly - its all a bidding thing done on a 6 month or sometimes less cycle. so i think its safe to assume that there isnt a lot of due diligence re: standards of employment. the vast majority of american companies that i deal with have no ownership or control of the factories that make their imported goods.

xp to dayo

Hoo boy. That's kind of a big one, y'know? We're holding on to our low corporation tax rate, and therefore a reasonable amount of manufacturing and low-grade white collar jobs for the moment, i guess. Our rapid growth happened at a stage that allowed us to shed total manufacturing dependence while myriad higher-qualified positions were available, so we're now very much a service-based economy- there's a lot of factors touted as to why we attracted the likes of google, microsoft, amazon etc who've all got their european hubs in dublin, but the ability to declare profits here @ 12% odd is a big one, which is why we traded everything but that when the IMF came calling. Poison chalice imo, but that's another thread.

xp cheers nv, i've to study limited differentiation tonight to get my bro past his repeats but if i get a chance i'll catch that.

Hey, guys! There are already some global labor standards in place for different industries. I don't know about any of them except printing/binding, but we haven't used any companies who don't comply with our chosen standard for maybe a decade. (I'll remember the name of the standards organization in a sec.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Well, there's a regulating body (International Standards Organization = ISO) who gives tests and visits plants to inspect conditions, and plants have to achieve certain standards, including health & safety, labor conditions, living conditions for on-site personnel, etc. If they don't pass them but the deviation is small, they get another chance in like the next 6 month period.

P much factories know that they're either within shooting distance of the rules, so they clean up a few areas of compliance and they're in, or they're not interested because their customers won't care.

But it's pretty uncool as a highly visible commercial enterprise NOT to care, like, I make books for children, so if child labor were being used to make them, that would be a) indefensible and b) terrible for business! For instance, Disney has one of the strongest sets of standards in the entire Asian manufacturing business; if a facility has been DISNEY-approved, you know you're safe to send work there.

― Octavia Butler's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiised (Laurel), Thursday, October 6, 2011 10:19 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

I have worked in QA for a US housewares company for almost 8 years now (almost all injection-molded plastic stuff with stainless steel, very little wood stuff and almost no textiles), and basically everything Laurel said reflects my experience.

We own none of the factories who produce our goods (almost all of them in China, most of those in Dongguan). We conduct third-party audits of all of them assessing labor practices, working conditions, bookkeeping practices etc. On top of that, most of the larger retailers who carry our products have their own labor standards for which they send in their OWN inspectors to look at the factories we work with. Obviously the factories know when they are gonna be audited and probably can sweep a lot of stuff under the carpet the day before or whatever, but we also visit all these places frequently to do routine QA inspections and our inspectors tend to keep a weather eye out when they are on-site.

Wages for factory workers in China have gone up a great deal and are still rising, but it's still difficult for these factories to retain them. Each holiday break, a huge percentage of workers stay in their hometowns and don't return (= right after each holiday the products are shitty because everyone on the line are noobs). Workers in China or at least in Dongguan and surrounding areas no longer feel they have to work in manuafacturing and are more liable to seek something better. To me, Jon Lewis, this is a good thing, even though to me, manager of QA inspections, it's a total headache.

Also, word on the street is that the government is pushing manufacturing out of its classic areas in order to recast these towns as more touristy and 21st century. So I expect more and more of our vendors to either 1. head to the next province over 2. go out of business.

Another thing to consider in this convo is the rising rising rising fuel cost of shipping manufactured goods from China to the U.S. There has to come a point when the labor savings no longer offsets the cost of shipment. This already happened to us with one product which was large yet lightweight-- we moved it to a factory in Philly.

Great thread BTW.

peak oil will be what saves us

great post jon, btw

thx but i forgot to say I have no idea what the state of play is in China garments & textiles manufacturing. Like, whether the old 'sweatshop' conditions have been systemically remediated at all. I suspect so?

i wd imagine it's harder for the old sweatshops to continue in the same way as long as more attractive jobs are competing for labour?

willing to bet that workers probably still work 10-12 hours a day with mandatory overtime

Um in our experience here, workers WANT to work overtime and the standardized labor regs won't allow them to.

oh, hm. I'm misremembering

maybe some kind of shift-juggling where they don't get overtime

I find it amusing when people consider Taiwan, Singapore or South Korea "developing countries".

esp when their cost of living is > the USA's.

I think some of that willingness to work what we consider inhumane hours is that people don't do these factory jobs for a long time, typically. They work for 6 mos or 12 mos or a couple of years, max, and then as jon said, travel back to the country for Chinese New Years (a month-long holiday for some factories) and don't come back.

shasta you're the first person to mention those countries itt

to me what's hilarious is that even luxury companies manufacture their things in china - as if their profit margins weren't big enough already

laurel I think notions of amount of hours considered to be inhumane is going to be informed as much by culture and necessity and willingness as much as by some objective limit of what we consider humane.

some of these workers make far more than they would otherwise at home by working in these factories, and want to maximize their pay as much as possible, maybe working 12, 14, 16 hours a day. in this respect, they are not very different than investment bankers or biglaw lawyers.

others, however, are not willing and maybe be compelled to. that is abuse.

Laurel OTM... for the workers on the factory floor I think it's kind of like those insane fishing boats ppl work on for a summer (except minus the adventure, plus ping pong, and for 11 months instead of one season...)

re: 'even' luxury companies manufacturing in china- can't have 'too much' profit. the place i quit sold upmarket geegaws and knicknacks in posh homeware stores, has a big share of the outdoor pursuits clothing & equipment market, not low-margin stuff

xpost yeah compulsory overtime is a whole different thing and of course there are different ways in which it can be 'compelled'.

another interesting wrinkle-- Chinese govt labor laws state that workers should be compensated by time worked whereas a lot of workers prefer to be compensated per finished piece.

i've worked on insane fishing boats for the summer too!

whereas a lot of workers prefer to be compensated per finished piece

Wasn't this how Stalin did it?

laurel I think notions of amount of hours considered to be inhumane is going to be informed as much by culture and necessity and willingness as much as by some objective limit of what we consider humane.

otm I consider 40 hour weeks inhumane considering how much money this country has

laurel I think notions of amount of hours considered to be inhumane is going to be informed as much by culture and necessity and willingness as much as by some objective limit of what we consider humane.

The complaint I have heard is that the regs our plants are required to follow limit the work-day to a Western-standard value, ie 8 hours or no more than 10-hr shifts, 4 days a week, or something, and the workers are frustrated by not being allowed to put in more time. NB I have not spoken to the mainland China employees personally in Chinese without mgmt present so I cannot promise that this is their true opinion, but that's what I hear.

If fuel costs end up making container ships a relatively expensive way to ship things, the world is going to change in a massive, massive way.

that is the underlying concern of the suburbs thread and the energy thread and like a million other threads

I'm also wondering how much of it is actual worker feedback and how much of that is predatory bosses - "oh yeah, our workers want to work MORE!" *pockets money* xxp

A one-dollar rise in world oil prices leads to a 1 percent rise in trade transport costs. In terms of the marine and inland transport movement of a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Columbus, Ohio, the total transport cost was $3,000 when oil prices were $20 per barrel in the year 2000. Today at $140 per barrel, the cost is $8,000, and should oil prices rise to $200 per barrel transport cost would rise to $15,000 per FEU

http://www.marad.dot.gov/documents/Modal_Shift_Study_-_Technical_Report.pdf

!!

We may get our industry back, people!!

it's a definite possibility, though it's such a huge concept and so diametric to trends over the past 20+ years that it's hard to get your head around it.

Village blacksmith ftw

or what you said upthread, dayo, i.e. peak oil will save us

i.e. mommy will take the candy away

30 years ago you could ship a 40-foot container across the pacific for $3000

hmm can i say 'diametric' like that? To the grammar fiends thread

that report says that even in 2000 you could get a 40-foot container all the way across the pacific and up to columbus OH for $3000.

would be an interesting study imo- what effect, if any, has the ability to kick a ball in the street had on the cost of transoceanic goods transportation ?

oh sorry i didn't realize we were doing this

brb

(think "diametrical" would be better in that context, not sure why)

'diametrically opposed' yeah.

http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photo/_new/080827-girl-vmed-645a.widec.jpg

I find this photo really touching - behind every strong iphone stands an even stronger chinese worker working 12 hours a day

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?

In terms of rising fuel $

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.

I wonder if anyone's done simulations, would be interesting to know the range of scenarios.

We started to see it earlier this year when container ships slowed down to their most fuel-efficient speeds, which are not their top speeds, and ocean transits started to take an extra week or so. But when the price of oil went back down, that seemed to go away.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/5741896/Could-ship-be-a-scavengers-bonanza

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/6287457.stm

lol @ getting a BMW bike from a broken up container washed up on the shore

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?

it's completely moot because lots of people clearly are choosing the factories in preference to the paddy fields

I'm not making a point! Except that I was wondering if foxconn workers (some of whom are committing suicide over conditions) are really sitting in the factories going "man this sure beats the hell out of rice paddy labor" or whether it's more just the higher wages that attracts them because surplus wage = being able to imagine a future of not doing that kind of labor.

As far as them choosing, I agree, but even that is worth questioning, because people's "choices" aren't always so simple -- e.g. a rural poor person can wind up going very far away for better prospects, realizing the prospects aren't quite as wonderful as promised, and not be in a position to return.

'factory worker at foxconn' doesn't rank very highly on the list of 'shittiest jobs in china' tbh

yes to all that

just fwiw i've farmed, fished and factory worked and farming > fishing > factory but i'd not run back to any of them

there are recycling centers in china where children are paid to burn plastic w/ a lighter, determine what kind of plastic it is from the smell it gives off, and toss the piece into the appropriate pile

\O_o/

well if it keeps them outta the schools

I protested the conditions at my local Apple store.

It worked out well, as I could do my protesting while standing in line for the new release iPhone.

ZING for iphone

i like this kid, hes got moxie

the this american life ep is actually a really good introduction to foxconn's greatest hits right up until it takes a turn for the repulsive and trots out kristof & krugman in the interest of 'balance' to tell us how sweatshops are actually awesome and cool, instead of barbaric and anti-human. the worst part is when glass asks the audience if we should feel 'weird' about being complicit in mass exploitation, like it's an awkward moment on seinfeld or something

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2009/5/8/1241792015854/Friedrich-Engels-001.jpg

^ dude called it in 1844

As far as them choosing, I agree, but even that is worth questioning, because people's "choices" aren't always so simple -- e.g. a rural poor person can wind up going very far away for better prospects, realizing the prospects aren't quite as wonderful as promised, and not be in a position to return.

We're not talking about one guy that swallowed the bait, we're talking many millions of people.

sometimes people are making a decision between two pretty shitty lives

I suspect that this thread is a bit mis-named, as it makes the assumption that all overseas manufacturing in developing countries is hideously exploitative.

I also find myself pondering one of the world's great questions - when manufacturing in Britain, the USA, Germany and so on was in its hideously exploitative phase, workers reacted by forming trade unions, often in the face of extreme hostility from factory owners and their friends in positions of political power. I wonder why this does not happen so much now.

employers weren't in the position to shut down production and open up a factory in another country in a day

sometimes people are making a decision between two pretty shitty lives

― iatee, Tuesday, January 24, 2012 12:16 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Right. And I think it's important also not to lose sight of the larger ways in which a system might be making things worse for people. Job X > Job Y should not be the discussion ender. Is job x part of a sustainable upward trend in conditions? How did we get to the situation where job x and job y were the only choices in the first place, and do more job x's mean a trend away from the choices being that bleak in the long run?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I would like to know them.

employers weren't in the position to shut down production and open up a factory in another country in a day

can they do this now? really?

And also, is it possible to posit some kind of workable universal floor in terms of what we consider humane work? And is there any way to actually make such a thing economically viable?

One thing that the nytimes article barely touches on is the fact that even if we wanted to return to a hideously exploitive foxconn style manufacturing in the states or UK we would have a hard time of it because of the lack of Manufacturing engineers. I n my experience; of all the engineering disciplines it is the hardest to recruit for and most likely to be filled by an immigrant. We've had an open slot for one for over 6 months now and I've come to the conclusion that it is easier to invent a cloning device to replicate our one (chinese) manufacturing engineer than to find one in the market.

I guess the point is that the infrastructure to support manufacturing is degraded to such a colossal extent that we need to open the immigration gates to get it back.

However to do that someone would need to set a long term strategic plan in motion and as far as manufacturing goes neither the US or UK has had one of those in over 30 years.

In answer to DV's question:

I suspect that the current exploitative factories stay ahead of the curve wrt to maintaining the level of tolerable exploitation. It's been noticeable over the last few years, where the chinese labour market has been tightening, that wages and conditions have been improving and there are (admittedly rare) examples of strikes and other forms of unrest. The chinese are learning from history. (external pressures from consumer economies have also shifted the needle)

I'd love to see a graph that baselines real wages for England in 1750 and China in 1980 and see how much faster wage growth in China goes. (throw on trade volume and population curves as other factors as well)

I suspect that this thread is a bit mis-named, as it makes the assumption that all overseas manufacturing in developing countries is hideously exploitative.

u shd read it.

And I think it's important also not to lose sight of the larger ways in which a system might be making things worse for people.

I do agree with this line of thinking, fwiw, it's just that I think in this specific instance we should acknowledge that economic growth in China clearly has raised ordinary people's incomes. That's not to say that there isn't something deeply problematic about how China's path to growth has had a worldwide impact on the balance of power between capital and labor.

because of the lack of Manufacturing engineers. I n my experience; of all the engineering disciplines it is the hardest to recruit for and most likely to be filled by an immigrant. We've had an open slot for one for over 6 months now and I've come to the conclusion that it is easier to invent a cloning device to replicate our one (chinese) manufacturing engineer than to find one in the market.

Have experienced a similar phenomenon at my (NYC) company. Applicants from Greece, India... However, our US engineers start morphing into mfg engineers pretty soon as we send them to China for factory visits several times a year...

And also, is it possible to posit some kind of workable universal floor in terms of what we consider humane work? And is there any way to actually make such a thing economically viable?

some could argue that sitting in a chair for 40 hours a week in a bleak office isn't humane.

'economically viable' is about as fuzzy a concept as humane. could 'we' have everything we need in a world where nobody worked more than 40/h weeks. sure. could 'we' have everything we want? the 'we' is in quotes because a large % of the world still doesn't care whether they have to pay $100 or $800 for an ipad, they're busy worrying about clean drinking water etc.

ultimatelly the biggest moral problems imo:
a. everyone on earth who's still living in destitute poverty
b. maintaining economic growth in a world w/ limited resources + global warming etc.

I also find myself pondering one of the world's great questions - when manufacturing in Britain, the USA, Germany and so on was in its hideously exploitative phase, workers reacted by forming trade unions, often in the face of extreme hostility from factory owners and their friends in positions of political power. I wonder why this does not happen so much now.

― The New Dirty Vicar, Tuesday, January 24, 2012 12:21 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark

feel like the political situation in USA/UK - that whole democratic representation thing - probably contributed

I do agree with this line of thinking, fwiw, it's just that I think in this specific instance we should acknowledge that economic growth in China clearly has raised ordinary people's incomes. That's not to say that there isn't something deeply problematic about how China's path to growth has had a worldwide impact on the balance of power between capital and labor.

― lukas, Tuesday, January 24, 2012 12:45 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is true - but some groups of people's incomes have been raised more than others. the problem of what to do with farmers and migrant workers, who off the top of my head probably constitute of 1/2 to 2/3 of china's population, is still unanswered.

feel like the political situation in USA/UK - that whole democratic representation thing - probably contributed

also when the worst exploitation was taking place in those countries it was entirely in-house, there was no client company from outside pressuring the governments to turn a blind eye or worse

maintaining economic growth in a world w/ limited resources + global warming etc.

not an economist but it feels to me like the problem is not maintaining growth so much as having a growth-dependent system at all?

well at the very least getting people outta poverty requires growth

or redistribution

sorta. you can't redistribute an apartment building to africa.

yet

*ponders*

focus on growth reliancy has always troubled me, encourages boom/bust cycles, increases pressure to provide proper checks & balances. What's the economy running from here.

also economic growth can be a lot of different things. I can spend $30 on 30 iphone apps or mp3s or whatever and, ignoring what happens to that money afterwards, I'm 'contributing to economic growth' without seriously contributing to emissions. or I can spend the $30 on gas and go for a drive.

xp nope, but cmon now, if only there were some method of storage and transportation of asset wealth hmmm

basically the problem isn't 'economic growth' the problem is energy dependent economic growth and there's some debate about how closely they correlate. there's pretty good evidence that it's 'pretty damn closely' but I don't think that has to be the case forever.

yeah but in periods when the economy isn't experiencing "growth" financial transactions are still constantly taking place. here in the free world people don't actually start starving because the economy's in recession.

again i'm admittedly an economic illiterate but surely the point is that growth is only an important motor for certain kinds of economies, which are replaceable with a different model in theory if not perhaps in fact

And also, is it possible to posit some kind of workable universal floor in terms of what we consider humane work? And is there any way to actually make such a thing economically viable?

― frogBaSeball (Hurting 2), Tuesday, January 24, 2012 12:36 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

probably the only rule that everybody can universally agree on is that you be 'properly compensated' in proportion to the work you do

if you are, how much you want to 'work' is up to you

probably the only rule that everybody can universally agree on is that you be 'properly compensated' in proportion to the work you do

that just moves the ball to another cup. what's 'properly compensated'? what does a human being need to live? etc.

I just mean that nobody thinks it's bad that we americans allow some people to work 100 hour work weeks because hey, we're paying them six figure salaries or higher!

I think it's bad!

mostly in the big picture cultural sense tho

what we really are some philosopher kings who will govern wisely and prevent us from excess

yeah but iirc that entails shooting all yr musicians oh hang on

often those people who work 100h weeks and making 6 figures don't believe that they're properly compensated

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/01/goldman-sachs-bonus-day-is-a-bloobath.html

and are

yeah but nobody else thinks they aren't, so they can go thumb themselves

workers reacted by forming trade unions, often in the face of extreme hostility from factory owners and their friends in positions of political power

Funnily enough, trade unions still face extreme hostility from factory owners and their friends in positions of political power... in 2012... in the UK

I sorta get at this logical endpoint a lot when I think about this stuff but coming off what I said I think are the big two moral q's (destitute poverty, climate change) there's a question about whether we should be 'economically efficient consumers' (possibly helps the most amount of people?), 'better consumers' (buy only from 'nice factories', helps certain people more) or 'not consumers at all' (the bad environmental effects from consumption matter more than helping people in china)

the answer is def 'consume less' but oh hey look the iphone 4s talks to you

usual problem of utilitarian ethics tho isn't it? if you only had a computer and a clear view of the future you could calculate the answer precisely but

destitute poverty and climate change/sustainability are two good places to draw firm lines, agreed, i think sustainability points towards answers in the questions you raise too? maybe?

sorta, but sustainability is still 'picking sides' (the environmental side > helping people in china) and there's a huge gap between living a nearly-emissions-free lifestyle (an a question about how many people could feasibly do it, and what we'd be giving up, etc.) and making some half-hearted gestures towards sustainability.

economic sustainability, lower profits for greater stability, etc

ah

i think i've written an exam answer on it 7 years ago please don't ask me to start dredging tho

I mean ultimately the need for gdp growth is more of a cultural thing than a 'requirement' for a market economy. would everyone here be happy making the same amount of money for the rest of their lives?

if prices continued to fall due to increased efficiencies ya sure

*claps hands, shooes away servants*

as long as the prices of everything stay the same!

exactly

fuck prices 'staying the same' some of the people in this economy are paid to invent eg kindles

also no growth probably will make it harder to find a cure for every disease in the world ever, and the iphone 6 will never come out, just saying

on the league table of lifestyle we're all sitting happy in the top division let's be honest

nah i don't believe that capitalist expansion is the only driver for invention

regulate the price of new technology and ruthlessly cull outdated industries

xp can you tie 'no growth' to 'no scientific discoveries' tho iatee?

xp what nv said

invention almost by definition would create growth

lots of new shit only becomes really expensive after venture capitalists pay the penniless inventor $$$$$$ for a cut

xp

again i don't see why? invention tied to markets yeah but

to be precise, i'm not advocating a lack of growth by never inventing anything new of allowing for technological shift, it's growth through little more than inflation of unchanging assets that gets you into the deep shit, right?

because somebody buying medicine that they couldn't buy yesterday increases the gdp! I mean it's hard to do this math in an imaginary socialist world but if we're talking about a slow-growth market economy...

xp

they're not buying the old medicine they used to buy though

just different medicine

and yes there's high lead-in times and developmental costs for new medicines, but the price of that type of product in first world markets tends towards the obscene due to nothing more than the economic/social agreement that allows it to be

also I think a lot of the health-related discoveries pre-capitalism were, in the historical perspective, 'the low hanging fruit'

I mean it's hard to do this math in an imaginary socialist world but if we're talking about a slow-growth market economy...

this is the heart of what i'm nagging at. it seems quite possible that the big concerns you raise - destitution and environmental destruction - just cannot be fixed by the kind of market economies we have now

(e.g. 'don't rub feces on sword wounds')

xpost

the economic/social agreement that allows it to be

The consensus that w/o high profits to reward long-term investments and counter the possibility that your drug ends up useless or getting banned, new drugs wouldn't be developed?

yes, essentially?

this is the heart of what i'm nagging at. it seems quite possible that the big concerns you raise - destitution and environmental destruction - just cannot be fixed by the kind of market economies we have now

I think they can w/ heavy global market-based environmental regulation - emissions markets etc.

you could have a university model, where knowledge is pursued for the sake of knowledge

xp

okay, but what about the human impact of increasingly scarce finite resources e.g. oil?

just cannot be fixed by the kind of market economies we have now

We will have growth as long as there are more ppl on the planet when you leave as there were when you came in. The question to me, therefore, is, "Are we a plague for life on theis planet?" If there's any hope that we're not, does it mean we must live considerably less comfortable lives than we do now? Is there any other system than the market that's more likely to provide us with the means, such as new growing techniques or new energy sources, to continue to thrive here on Earth?

everybody moves to big cities, that's always been my answer xp

xxp arguably allocating scarce resources is what market economies are best at.

i dunno if i buy this tho: I think they can w/ heavy global market-based environmental regulation - emissions markets etc.

do you not buy that it will happen in time or that it will work? cause I agree w/ the first half.

We will have growth as long as there are more ppl on the planet when you leave as there were when you came in.

'growth' for the purposes of this discussion being, iiuic, the economic kind (say a nominal global gdp or w/e) this relies on a number of assumptions that aren't necessarily imperative and binding constraints

e.g. oil?

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/unlocking-seaweeds-next-gen-crude-sugar/

darragh, population growth does feed economic growth alongside increases in productivity

once the wind/wave energy dudes get their shit together i'll be living in the new oman, motherfuckers

darragh, population growth does feed economic growth alongside increases in productivity

per capita increases in efficiency, increased asset efficiency through technology, etc- lots of ways in which growth isn't tied to a per capita figure (well, it is but not in a constant straight-line curve)

do you not buy that it will happen in time or that it will work? cause I agree w/ the first half.

yeah, first half. if we had the political will to set and enforce limits, emission markets would be great. i am possibly too defeatist.

My point, though, is that I'm far more sanguine about us finding new awesome shit than I am about feeding 10 billion ppl or dealing with the environmental effects of 7 billion zipping around in their seaweed-ethanol powered vehicles.

this is basically where my thinking has been stuck for years:

"emission markets would be great ... but we'll never do them."

"countries should enforce reasonable standards for wages, hours and benefits. but we'll inevitably be undercut by developing nations and really, how do you even lecture them when so many people are living on $1/day."

halp.

$1 a day isn't a bad wage depending

y'know, depending

it's pretty cool as long as ipads cost $1 in your country

per capita increases in efficiency, increased asset efficiency through technology, etc- lots of ways in which growth isn't tied to a per capita figure (well, it is but not in a constant straight-line curve)

again I think we have to draw a line between different types of economic growth 'spend $1 on ipod app vs. $1 on gas' and, prob more importantly, spend more time thinking about things that aren't included in traditional measure of gdp that are becoming a big part of our lives (what's the economic value of ilx? etc.)

Pretty sure it's a net negative.

no economic value but possible substitute product for more expensive means of entertainment? information exchange on the internet is a bit of a mixed bag to work out economically tbh

well if you wanted a brute force way of calculating it, you could figure out what would every individual here be willing to pay if the alternative was no ilx.

stet it up

if stet required 100k to run the site, could we come up with it? I wonder.

i'd back us for 10k easy

if all your forms of free entertainment simultaneously said "cough up", who would you pay first

ilx, btjunkie

that's about it??

btjunkie

"i wish for a lamp that grants infinite wishes"

haha

but yeah the main idea is that we can always have 'more stuff' as long as stuff is 1s and 0s, or people doing stuff for you, we prob can't always have more stuff as long as stuff is, well, everything else

how much more stuff had you in mind- modern technology has been, in many ways, the breaking down of physical stuff into those 1s and 0s

idgi btjunkie tbh

well you can't bittorrent a house or an SUV

it's too bad cause that would solve the african poverty problem too

you did raise that earlier, tbf.

while nobody has offered the increasingly efficient management of information (and therefore entertainment, communications, financials, etc) as an answer to food shortages or housing crises in disadvantaged areas, these advances nonetheless create extra capacity in the existing global economy that could theoretically (in an ideal world) focus on the problems that stem from material resource and manpower shortages.

it's not 'a rising tide', but it's maybe close- nonetheless, increased efficiencies in any area free up at least those resources in that area that are transferable, basically

well from an environmental pov most peoples' emissions don't come from entertainment/communication/finance. this is partly why I'm an annnoying urbanist cause I think that hyperurban efficiences allow us to live the same 21st century lifestyle w/ less.

also 'free up' - sorta... I mean what's 'extra capacity'? efficiencies bring wealth but nobody w/ that wealth seems to consider it 'extra capacity'. like, with a moderately conservative definition of 'what does a human being need to live a decent lifestyle' we already have plenty of extra capacity w/ the wealth in america and western europe. if the wealthy americans who gain from future efficiences were willing to be taxed on it and allow it all to go to africa, that'd be one thing. ultimately a political problem not an economic one.

redistribution!

guess redistribution doesn't have to happen willingly, but it's important to keep reminding people it will be less painful in the long run if it does

you're picking the problems with my ubersystem as if you don't already agree with the structures in place covering the rest- huge transfer payments to developing economies from first world corps manufacturing and polluting overseas but selling in eeg us markets, enormous carbon taxes, strictly enforced environmental & workforce welfare regulations yaddda yadda yadda

all we need, really, is to get someone in power that will get the ball rolling, i tihnk that this obama dude could be our man

yeah I mean we prob agree in general terms about the big picture solutions, I just think the cultural/political resistence to big picture solutions is p fucking rigid

well yeah but while we're just shooting the shit like

re. emergence of unionisation in Europe and North America in late 19th and early 20th centuries:

feel like the political situation in USA/UK - that whole democratic representation thing - probably contributed

Well, maybe yes, in the UK at least where the unions formed a political party that was able to contest anti-union legislation, but unionisation also occurred to some extent in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries like Germany and Russia.

India is not short of trade unionists btw

... having said that, I'm not sure what countries you were referring to originally

re. emergence of unionisation in Europe and North America in late 19th and early 20th centuries:

feel like the political situation in USA/UK - that whole democratic representation thing - probably contributed

Well, maybe yes, in the UK at least where the unions formed a political party that was able to contest anti-union legislation, but unionisation also occurred to some extent in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries like Germany and Russia.

― The New Dirty Vicar, Wednesday, 25 January 2012 05:31 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The development of democracy went hand in hand with industrialization and urbanization. The anti corn-law movement and the chartists couldn't have happened without these and resulted in expanding the franchise and other democratic reforms, long before trade unions had much impact. Liberalism did a lot before the left really got going.

More on rising equality in China:

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=12840

that's about overall inequality between urban/rural populations - but I'd be more interested in seeing the data between levels of income

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?_r=3&hpw=&pagewanted=all

lol:

“I actually think Apple does one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions in our supply chain,” said Mr. Jobs, who was Apple’s chief executive at the time and who died last October.

“I mean, you go to this place, and, it’s a factory, but, my gosh, I mean, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools, and I mean, for a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory.”

Others, including workers inside such plants, acknowledge the cafeterias and medical facilities, but insist conditions are punishing.

“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

in response to o. nate's link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/world/asia/26iht-letter26.html?pagewanted=all

Using innovative research techniques that bypassed official data, Mr. Wang estimated that not only were trillions of renminbi failing to appear in official assessments, but about two-thirds of it belonged to the top 10 percent of the population.

His conclusion: the rich were hiding their wealth, and society was far more unequal than the government was admitting — a politically sensitive subject.

so yeah overall income is rising, and a rising tide floats all boats, but overall income inequality is still probably increasing

the scott sumner link above is half pretty otm/interesting half sorta huh? I agree w/ pretty much everything until he gets here:

The current inequality trends in the US look bad, but it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw a reversal in those trends as well. The entire world is evolving toward a near 100% service economy in terms of jobs (not output.) I can’t imagine why low-skilled workers would not be able to do the “jobs of the future,” (which will be serving others) but perhaps I’m missing something.

does anyone know what the world evolves towards when one guy owns a single 3D printer that prints all the world's goods?

on a certain level I wonder if we think/talk too much about apple's factories, obv they are a big symbol of 21st century happy capitalism but the people making random plastic walmart crap in some other factory merit the same attention. I guess foxconn is one of the biggest players I just sometimes get the feeling like the 'people making your iphones are suffering' narrative disproportionally interests people .

sure but that's just the way it is, it's v convenient if you can have a kinda implied binary by only knowing about one half of that equation. didn't nike get busted for sweatshops in the '90s, & adidas sales uptick accordingly, even though they were both sorta equivalent in the kinda labour practices they were involved in? it's just that you're not on the side of the textbook bad dudes.

maybe not quite the same bc apple is as much its own thing as it is a competitor for each specific product, but still

It's that people have an emotional relationship with their iPhones that they don't have with the plastic crap they buy at WalMart, so if you print a story that includes iPhones, readers will read it. Journalists and editors know this. It's the same dynamic that makes advertisers put babies in ads because they know it will draw your attention more than a pic of their product would.

yeah apple's just a way to bring attention to the issue. chrome-plating is a nasty process but nobody really cares about what happens in a faucet or tailpipe manufacturing plant.

right I agree w/ all this stuff, I'm just saying sometimes you could get the impression that china's nothing more than a big apple factory, which I guess will eventually be true, but is far from being true today

It's also a big book factory, that's how I see it anyway.

That'd be interesting to get the full scope of overseas manufacturing and how it relates to our lives as consumers and the lives of workers in the factories. Maybe it'd be a bit too much for people to face, though, to see how much of our convenience and luxury rests on the backs of people living and working in terrible conditions. Seems like the kinda thing people would block out of their minds, though ... nobody (or at least decent people) likes being complicit in abusing people, especially when it makes their lives more convenient.

Funny how human nature doesn't change very much... was there ever a period in human history without some type of slavery? It's not just having people in physical shackles, but also circumstances and conditions that compel sacrificing your life and individual freedom to survive. Even when we do have the luxury of actual freedom of choice, there was a response to that: consumerism. Will the future be any different?

I think the more interesting question is, let's say the developing world agrees to strictly adhire to american labor standards. how much more would an iphone cost? would it be worth the jobs lost in the process?

The experience of working in assembly of small electronics, the experience of working in a factory running injection molding machines making plastic bowls, and the experience of working in a garment factory all very very different. Part of the reason why there's so much focus on that Apple plant is that the pace there is super intense because of the insane demand. There are industries where factory workers get to chill a bit, believe me.

err adhire = adhere

would it be worth the jobs lost in the process?

I don't believe any jobs would be lost - really. i think demand is price inelastic well beyond the price increase required to avoid sweatshops.

the difficulty is coordinated action - china doesn't want to go first because it's already facing pressure from vietnam, etc. apple doesn't want to raise the price of the iphone if samsung doesn't do this. etc.

well are we talking about some global minimum wage too? and I wasn't really talking about *just the iphone* which is fairly unusually price inelastic, I was just using it as a default object in a world w/ universal labor standards.

I'd imagine that if all the East Asian countries banded together and enforced higher qualify of life initiatives, people would find another way to make the most profits they can if there's an available alternative. Africa next? China's already moving some manufacturing to the continent and treating African employees even worse than Chinese employees.

So, probably won't make a squat of difference if China and all the Asian companies raise their standards to American standards, and probably won't do squat to help American workers. That's a totally off-hand conclusion, though.

China's not manufacturing anything in Africa, they are mining for resources

Foxconn, otoh, is opening a factory in brazil

that's why I said we should try to imagine the consequences of doing it globally xp

China is not moving manufacturing outside China, they are merely moving manufacturing the next province inland (previously the ass end of nowhere).

"manufacturing TO the next..."

right, a global minimum wage would do it. hopefully a living wage based on in-country prices.

it create a really weird situation as the ~800 million subsistence farmers in the world suddenly have an even greater incentive to migrate to cities.

*would create

Jon L I thought China was starting to feel pressure from countries like Vietnam?

Yes, sure, but they can shave labor costs down a bit by moving inland to a province which has not been through this whole process yet. Meanwhile the long-standing manufacturing cradle is being transformed into tech business 'destination cities'.

it create a really weird situation as the ~800 million subsistence farmers in the world suddenly have an even greater incentive to migrate to cities.

― lukas, Thursday, January 26, 2012 1:22 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

china claims that the number of urban residents now outnumber rural, though I have my doubts - that's just taking into account migrant workers, who still maintain hukou back in their rural villages

right, a global minimum wage would do it. hopefully a living wage based on in-country prices.

well while I don't think it holds true in all cases, I think that would cost jobs in the big picture. if cheap walmart plastic is more expensive, we're buying less of it, etc.

and yeah, traditionally it's been the eastern and southern coasts of China that have been the most developed through history - just because of proximity to water and shipping. china's infrastructure is catching up, rail lines are being built, to the interior - maybe in 50 years, china will be like america, where even living in the middle of bumfuck nowhere kansas (apologies to all people from kansas) can enjoy fresh ocean caught swordfish and fruits from venezuela.

haha in 50 years people in kansas might not either

As we talked about much earlier in this thread (ppl should read the whole thing it's good!) the lower cost of labor inland may be offset by the higher cost of trucking/railing the goods a further distance to the port...

i'm sure that would be true in some cases, but in other cases mightn't the wage increase just be absorbed by cutting profits? couldn't we think about the minimum wage basically as a redistributive tax?

xxxp

I think the more interesting question is, let's say the developing world agrees to strictly adhire to american labor standards.

As I've posted before in this thread (now lost in the fold I think), one of the pressures in my industry happens when a certain project requires us to adhere to American-level labor standards and we're told repeatedly that the factory employees WANT to work overtime, 6 days a week, longer shifts, etc. Because a lot of them will only be doing this job for a year or two or three, it's not a lifetime of the same labor conditions every day stretching in front of them.

At least this is my impression. Several other posters (dayo?) raised doubts about whether what I was hearing was actually the voice of the workers or the management.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-05/world-bank-china-may-cooperate-to-transfer-manufacturing-jobs-to-africa.html">=http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-05/world-bank-china-may-cooperate-to-transfer-manufacturing-jobs-to-africa.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/04/china-manufacturing-factories-africa">=http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/04/china-manufacturing-factories-africa

I was just guessing off-hand, but it's hard to see Chinese manufacturing moving to Africa as not being in the realm of possibility. It's a bargaining chip in a way ... if things get too expensive to produce in China, move it somewhere cheaper if possible. It's not like tycoons have any particularly local allegiances beyond needing labor and resources.

I'm seeing some efforts to move some manuf to Thailand, tbh. Not sure how this figures in.

i'm sure that would be true in some cases, but in other cases mightn't the wage increase just be absorbed by cutting profits? couldn't we think about the minimum wage basically as a redistributive tax?

well that might be the case for a cut of the iphone $ and related products, but in the big picture I don't think very many things we buy are that inelastic and I don't think your average american has *that much* breathing room in their budgets. which is to say on a certain cut would be redistributive but I think that wouldn't make up for the overall losses.

plus in this world american goods and services are now more attractively priced - go to a concert instead of buy plastic crap etc.

i'm not arguing that there are a lot of goods that are price inelastic, i'm arguing that there ... some ... industries that rack up enough profit to absorb cost increases without increasing prices. i don't know how many, i guess.

apple is pretty unique in that regard - for PC manufacturing, profits are RAZOR THIN

aw

I like the idea of a global minimum wage, but how would that ever come into existence? Would it be required for global stability? If not, it's hard for me to see how people demanding that would have enough bargaining power to make it happen.

As long as globalization exists and cheap sources of labor exist (taking into account cost inputs: fixed costs of infrastructure and developing labor pool, costs of production and shipping per #units, etc., on price considering demand), it completely obliterates any power workers have to make demands on their own behalf in the long term.

What are the solutions here to regain power on that level to make these demands effectively ... armed revolution? Same people take power as we have in power now. Maybe the only solution is if every consumer makes the demand themselves in refusing to buy products manufactured in a certain way, but that depends on the factors of: access to information, and going against the grain of people liking convenience and dealing with their own problems. It's up to us to take account of the social costs ... but that depends on how active and altruistic people are, and I'm a little cynical to believe that would make much of a difference. :{}

Just seems like we're in a very long-term stretch of exploitative labor on the global scale re: manufacturing. I'd love to see how Africa is as a future manufacturing base, because if it is then don't see much hope for this trend changing unless something totally unexpected happens. Shit's different now.

http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/31/10284158-the-chinese-want-jobs-too

Workers want those jobs
On Monday, tens of thousands of people lined up outside a job agency to apply for an estimated 100,000 new jobs Foxconn is seeking to fill at its factory in Zhengzhou, the capital of central Henan province.
Foxconn wants to double its current workforce of 130,000 at the Zhengzhou plant, which it opened last year. The facility already churns out 200,000 iPhones a day and is part of Foxconn’s grand plan to make Zhengzhou the world’s largest smartphone manufacturing base.
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The basic starting salary advertised--according to a report posted on M.I.C. Gadget, a blogsite about tech and other related matters in China—is 1,650 yuan a month ($261), which includes dorm housing and food.
The pay is lower than comparable salaries Foxconn pays workers at its Shenzhen factory in southern China. But that may be a sacrifice Henan workers are willing to make initially.
With a population in excess of 100 million, Henan is China’s most populous province. A fifth of them are migrant workers who travel widely to find jobs in the country’s more prosperous regions like the south or coast.

$261 a month on top of housing and food is not completely terrible, especially assuming certain things are going to be a lot cheaper there than we're used to. I mean at least that almost guarantees you have extra money to send to your family or save if you want, as opposed to making exactly enough to survive.

I would wager that, taking into account cost of living, that salary is probably equivalent to a 20,000-30,000 a year salary here. but I'm not an economist so I don't know how to directly make those comparisons.

cross-posted from the china thread

http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/1670/DUMPLINGS!!-for-sale

a good picture of what poor people in china do that doesn't involve making iphones, it's pretty sad

Interesting China fact:

The richest 70 members of China’s legislature added more to their wealth last year than the combined net worth of all 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the president and his Cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court justices...
The wealthiest member of the U.S. Congress is Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who had a maximum wealth of $700.9 million in 2010, according to the center. If he were in China’s NPC, he would be ranked 40th. Per capita income in China is about one-sixth the U.S. level when adjusted for differences in purchasing power.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/02/china-fact-of-the-day-6.html

Meanwhile, domestic warehouse work in the undeveloping united states:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

there's a few details that are a bit fucked up but feeling a lot of "yeah, so?" knee-jerk too.

the great convergence

"amalgamated" is a thin disguise for "amazon"

http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/01/19/fewer-more-demanding-workers-for-vietnamese-factories/#axzz1juui4rRO

Unlike China, the vast Communist neighbour to which it is often compared, Vietnam does not have large pools of migrant workers desperate for factory jobs, says Pincus:
“In China, there’s still huge a migration to the coast. There are hundreds of millions of potential workers who have few options. In Vietnam, the migration is smaller, the country is smaller and for many people there are other, better options.”

sad lol

http://www.chinalawblog.com/2012/03/the_end_of_cheap_china_part_v_vietnam_burmamyanmar_and_the_next_big_thing-2.html

http://motherjones.com/environment/2012/03/walmart-china-sustainability-shadow-factories-greenwash?page=1

http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-03-20-now-can-we-start-talking-about-the-real-foxconn/

good post but I'm afraid that 'foxconn apologist' may be a hard label to shake

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/03/iphone-factories-chinese-dreams.html

So this Hanjin Shipping collapse is really something. Container vessels full of TVs doomed to circle port forever as their crews starve. Christmas ruined. Etc.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/billions-in-cargo-remains-stranded-at-sea-1473285117

The fact it is all being documented by an artist in residence is a fabulous twist.

Can't read the WSJ article but it's kind of amazing that the first major container line to go bust in thirty years did so at a time of super-low oil prices.

I'm learning a lot of things I should have already known as a result of this toothsome story.

It's surely going to impact my day job as well (though we don't ship anything with Hanjin)

Here's a great piece about the sham of Nike's "Girl Effect" campaign vs the realities for women working in its Vietnam factories.

Chapo Trap House's interview with the author is also great.

a little bit of third world in small town dayton ohio

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/business/economy/ohio-factory-jobs-china.html