Comment on Smartphones and computers are now exempt from Trump’s latest tariffs.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days agoBuilding iPhones in the US was never going to happen, it would double or triple the price if we did it here.
Comment on Smartphones and computers are now exempt from Trump’s latest tariffs.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days agoBuilding iPhones in the US was never going to happen, it would double or triple the price if we did it here.
MDCCCLV@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
It’s not about the price. There just isn’t enough capacity and workers to build that many.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Which is why the price would dramatically go up. Labor is cheap in China because it’s plentiful, labor is expensive here because it’s not. Making iPhones here means diverting labor from other good jobs.
MDCCCLV@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
No I mean it wouldn’t be possible to make them here, if you tried to build a series of factories they would not have enough workers. It’s like an order of magnitude scale difference, the largest industrial plant in the US is 30k workers and in China the big one for iPhones is 350k. And that is 350k people working super long hours. Even in China labor isn’t plentiful anymore, there is shortages of labor in the coastal areas. You try to hire a staffing firm and tell them you want 300k skilled workers in a city and they’ll just laugh at you.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
If you increase wages high enough, you’ll get the workers. However, that’ll have negative effects for whatever those workers were doing before.