Comment on The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Yeah, that’s weird.
The reason iPhones are impractical to make here has nothing to do with anatomy or genetics, it’s purely labor costs. You can hire someone to work for very little and for very long in China, you can’t do that in the US. That’s it. That’s the only reason.
That’s it. That’s the only reason.
Manufacturing labour costs are far cheaper outside of China but the skills aren’t available. While labour costs are always a factor, the US just doesn’t have enough skilled manufacturing engineers or the supply chain you get somewhere like Shenzen.
Neither did China until Apple trained them
Shenzen’s supply chain is hardly all on Apple’s behalf or behest.
So 20-25 years from now we can be in the same place?
We? Not unless the entire government decided to fundamentally change overnight. The US government would never tell conglomerates what to do, it takes it’s orders from them.
Yes. But also the labour thing. Like alot.
the US just doesn’t have enough skilled manufacturing engineers or the supply chain
That’s because it was all outsourced to China because they utilize cheap/free labor.
If we had started doing tariffs 30 years ago we could have prevented that. Or if we enacted tariffs as part of a larger plan to slowly transition that industry back over the next 20 years, we could probably do that as well.
But just slapping a 250% tariff overnight and expecting everything to sort itself out is the kind of a plan only the orange moron could come up with.
The US had and has plenty, which is why manufacturing started in the US and migrated out once processes standardized enough to bring in less competent labor. Then labor became more competent, so more companies moved their operations there. A lot of US manufacturing engineers work with Chinese manufacturing facilities, because that’s where the labor is.
If the US wants to bring manufacturing back, it needs to be cheaper to do it domestically. That means automation, better materials transportation, and cheap raw materials.
I don’t see the point. Instead of bringing back manufacturing, improve education and focus on higher value work.
It’s not just skills, it’s also capital investment.
What’s important to note is all the pieces that get screwed together are still made over there…
We can pay tariffs on all the pieces and screw them together here, but that’s going to essentially have the same tariff costs as a completed iPhone.
Having someone screw the pieces together here would also raise costs due to labor costs. But they’re two completely different things.
They could even waive the tariffs and it would still be impractical to assemble in the US. The only way it’s practical here is with near full automation, and even then it’s probably still cheaper in China.
Labor and land are just so much cheaper there.
Apple spent literal decades training workers over there, and the Chinese government busted up Apple and all their workers went to competitors…
Like, sure, someone has to assemble the screws but it didn’t take Apple 20 years of investment to just teach them to use a screwdriver. It’s skilled labor.
Jon Stewart had some guy that wrote a book on it a week or two ago.
There’s some skilled labor, sure, but most of it is processes, and those can be replicated elsewhere. Apple brought the processes and refined them with local labor. But none of it is so special that it can’t be replicated elsewhere in a couple years (assuming facilities exist).
Look at phone repair, you can go to any mall and a teenager can disassemble and reassemble your phone with only a month or so of training. Making that process efficient is the hard part, and that only requires a few skilled jobs in a factory of thousands. The vast majority of jobs in assembly are pretty unskilled.
Chinese wages are not actually that low. In Beijing it’s ¥26.4 which is $3.66
US federal minimum wage is $7.25
Yet for these types of jobs, nobody gets paid minimum wage, even $15/hr is probably low. What is the typical Chinese employee making for this type of work?
Also several times the minimum wage. The minimum wage jobs are the do nothing jobs like door man.
The fact is, the difference is in concentration. You have millions of workers in Shenzhen all in the same area doing similar jobs. It makes it easy to ask one factory to manufacture a thing and the one next door to assemble it.
Well it’s also about supply chains. All the components are also made in China so you’d end up ordering the parts and then having to wait a month or more for them to be shipped to the US. If you want to avoid delays that means maintaining a significant stockpile of parts in the US that you may or may not ever actually use.
Sure, but I don’t think supply chains are the critical factor here. You don’t necessarily need local supply if you can break up delivery into small enough chunks, so whether it takes a day or a month to get a part isn’t important once the flow is going smoothly. You only need local supply if there’s a significant risk of disruption/delays.
Yes, it’s probably a bit cheaper to assemble things closer to where they’re produced, but I still think labor costs are the determining factor. US workers expect higher pay, more PTO, less hours worked per week, and more benefits, so even if all the parts were shipped in perfectly consistently, it would still be significantly more expensive to assemble iPhones in the US vs in China.
ogmios@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
They’ve been known to literally lock people in their factories, and even put up suicide nets to prevent workers from killing themselves.
Doom@ttrpg.network 6 days ago
Iqbal Masih
Google this boy if you haven’t heard of him everyone. Two adult men assassinated a child for what he had to say
match@pawb.social 6 days ago
This is the darkest thing I’ve seen today, thanks