Comment on The New York Times Just Published Some Bizarre Race Science About Asian Women
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days agoThey 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.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days 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.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Apple isn’t in the process of spending billions over decades to train people just to install screws…
Like, fuck Apple, I’ve never owned a single Apple product. But they wouldn’t have spent that much for so long to train people for unskilled labor.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Sure, but it does cost that much to build a suite of factories complete w/ automation and whatnot. Buildings are expensive, especially high tech ones, but that doesn’t mean the labor involved is particularly high skill. Components, processes, software, etc are still largely designed by highly skilled workers in western countries.
Yes, there are some skilled jobs there, but the ratio is much lower for the employees in China than domestically.