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China’s ‘Competitive Advantage’: Serfdom
A much-discussed report in the Sunday New York Times on why iPhones are made in China highlights the transition of Apple guru Steve Jobs who, a few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, bragged it was “a machine that is made in America.” Today, millions of Apple products like iPhones, iPads and Kindles are made in China sweatshops like Foxconn.
So what happened?
In a nutshell, this:
Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul [at a Chinese factory]. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
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.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
China’s use of near-slave labor conditions creates its “competitve edge.” But its advantage is not so much due to lower wages as to speed and turnover—an on-demand supply of workers who are housed little better than assembly parts, stacked in multiple dorm beds per room with no chance to escape.
Yet the New York Times repeats the mantra that corporations don’t create such jobs in the United States because of a “skills shortage.” Economist Clyde Prestowitz takes apart this tired refrain:
The Apple argument is that the U.S. schools and education system are not turning out the kinds of workers with the kinds of skills we need. So, we have no choice but to go overseas. But the truth is more nearly the opposite. It’s because the companies are moving the jobs overseas that no Americans are learning the necessary skills. This is true for two reasons. One is that Americans are generally not stupid and recognize that because of off-shoring there won’t be any of those kinds of jobs and thus there is no sense in learning the skills necessary to do them. The second is that most of this kind of job or skill training occurs on the job, and if there are no jobs then there will be no skills.
Prestowitz applauds President Obama for asserting in his State of the Union address Tuesday night that a U.S. “economy built to last” must have a robust manufacturing base and that corporate tax incentives to offshore jobs must be reversed.
But as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka notes, Obama alone can’t turn around this nation’s economy and create good jobs.
Now it’s time for Congress to stop standing in the way of rebuilding our country and act.
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4 Comments
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Several Chinese scientists came to the University of Michigan in the 1990′s to study with one of the world’s experts on industrial dust explosions, like those at Apple’s Chinese suppliers. This was part of the American effort to help China’s economy which had been close to collapse in the 1980′s. However, when those scientists went back to China they did not work on industrial safety but instead went to work for the Chinese military on making better bombs.
These are the choices China’s authoritarian regime has made but American universities still keep making deal after deal with them and sending our technology to China to help them modernize their military and compete with us for jobs. Obama says we are now serious about fair trade but he is coming to the U of M tomorrow and I wish he would speak to President Mary Sue Coleman and tell her the UM is an American university and should be doing everything it can to help us compete with China. Read more at http://www.china-threat.com
And what I’ve been saying so many times in this news blog… China’s industrial base is OWNED BY THE CHINESE MILITARY LEADERS!
So why are we promoting Chinese products?
OUR corporate greedy companies of every description imaginable have spent super big bucks in China, building factories, giving our technology to them, etc. in the name of helping them recover!! when really it’s all corporate greed in taking our jobs and giving them to them at unbelievable low pay scales!!!there’d be no global competition if it weren’t for our loveley CEO’s!! It’s really sickening and I can’t see how the bastards sleep at night!! you’re right, I hope Pres. Obama has enough BALLs to say to our colleges to start helping our own students improve and stop catering to foreign students!!We’ve been good enough to the world and all we get back is unfair trade,unfair tariffs,etc and on top of that, they all would just as soon kill us all as look at us!! Its time we wake up before we all have a Chinese bayonet stuck up our butts as they make us leave our homes!!! I really wish I were kidding , but I’m not!! and guess what!!! the bayonet thing will include the CEO’s and all the other filthy rich that are living the GOOD LIFE right now!!!
Obama can only stop job creation like he is doing with a pipe line from Canada.