Apple in China

it is important to note that your theory is not congruent with today's manuf. process. A simple example may shed some light on your misguided assumptions. Start by determining the number of vendors (parts suppliers) required to build an iPhone. Then multiply that by 3 to ensure that you have not underestimated. Each of those vendors need to produce parts JIT for Apple's brilliantly orchestrated supply chain fed assembly process.

With societal spotlights on carbon footprints these days, imagine what Apple has achieved.... yes, they located in the center of the officially designated high tech capital of China... Chengdu where all their vendors produce parts. That means that their physical neighbors in China produce parts for Apple and these parts firms are not likely to move given that they are located in the center of the designated 'high tech' capital of China. This designation is not new, it represents multi-billions of investment in the region to be able to attract the top tech design firms in the world to produce their wares in this region. example: Intel was there already several decades ago..

Now imagine moving the assembly plant (Apple) from your rather naive example over to the usa... the cost, the delays and the carbon footprint of shipping those parts to the US is what drives the cost not the labor.

In case you haven't already figured it out, high tech manufacturing requires thousands of suppliers to produce those wonderful 'must have' electronic gadgets. Until the transporter from star trek is put into commercial use, it would be naive to think that you could simply move the assembler (in this case Apple) far away from the parts suppliers without tremendous impact on both cost, timing, carbon footprint and productivity... in the end, according to my estimates, the cost of labor is only 40% of the whole picture.

All this argument seems to me to have missed a very important point. Here in UK we have very many healthy people who are either under employed or not employed. The not employed receive (rightfully) a subsistence handout to keep them alive, but not enough to keep body and soul together very well. The work ethic, religiously inspired or not, is a fundamental point of justice for the greater majority. If work is not available then handouts will have to continue, but they will decrease in value to the individuals as the general wealth decreases or meanness increases, or both.
If we continue to export jobs to elsewhere then there is no way this country will grow richer generally or at all evenly.
Perhaps making things by older and less"efficient" manner will keep more of us gainfully occupied. the need to import cheap goods then reduces as more of us will have earned surplus cash to be able to afford slightly more expensive goods.
This works remarkably well for 'fair trade' why not for British made goods?

"Chinese sweatshops are awful. Rice farms are worse."

Profiting on, and from, someone's misfortune is the worst.

k.

So, we rather have robots, and profit being made by american owners, and American robots, than to help poor Chinese people get out of poverty, and I right?

At the beginning of the 20th century Poland was a non-existent country. Poverty in a shtetl - for sure, but repression??

Please ask your correspondant to delete the very ugly word "gotten" from his vocabulary. "Become" fits quite nicely.

I'd like to add something to the industry v agriculture conundrum. 40 years ago I wrote a thesis showing that agriculture had two modes: (a) capitalistic, where workers worked till their wage equalled marginal product, ie maximised profit; and (b) communal, where workers worked till marginal wage was zero and so maximised production/consumption. Seems to me likely that the latter is now the situation on remaining Chinese farms, which explains the move in and out as industry expands. Which modality is so in Alabama who knows. ianbartlett17@gmail.com

We should really start to worry when Apple’s products state on the back: “Designed and made in China”.

To state and accept that the Chinese cannot ever design desirable new products is to ignore all those Chinese inventions of the past now largely ignored and forgotten.

China is a developing economy and developing means progress over time. It is naïve to believe that progress does not involve advancing the ability to think the impossible.

You are right to remind us of the sweatshops of the west at a similar stage of their development.

And still we call chinese naive and down primitive and abusive and what not ???? They are far more smarter than americans, as they are still feeding most of their people by giving them jobs. I really doubt they can't automate their entire industry. Yes they really CAN !! but who will pay the labourers then? Why don't you see the ever increasing unemployment rates in america!!

i wonder if i will still be alive in a future sci fi world where all production is done by robots. A few years ago this would be a fantasy but now i can see it as a plausible reality.What is the capitalist economic model doing to become if few people are paid wages, how will robotic production be purchased?

Perhaps a more cooperative approach between workers and their bosses might arise. Both need both so to co-operte rather than try to out-exploit the other may be a workable and sustainable solution with the right price being charged to the consumer.

This will mean fewer sales, fewer things being owned, more appreciation for those products when purchased and value restored to gadgets and life as a whole. Perhaps less spent on food with less waste and fewer overweight people.

Has anyone tried to calculate how much an iPhone would cost if it were assembled in compliance with U.S. labor rates and working standards, i.e. in the U.S.?

You ask "Does this matter for American workers? For America's trade balance? Is there anything to be done about it, even if it does?"

In America we could quit shutting down the discussion whenever the word "socialism" comes up on the subject of how people are going to have money when all the robots have taken all the jobs. Or, we could come up with the correct word for it that wouldn't sound so, well, socialistic and foreign to our ears. Then we can let the robots do whatever they like. Let's see...how about about "proeconomics"? Nah. Let me think....

A long time ago, when all the wags were naive about the future of technology, as well as robotics in America and the west, conversation on the subject often had a hard-to-avoid sidebar wherein someone is always asking how people are going to have money in the future if robots do all the work? Surely, a fair and sensible concern.
Now, not so much. Once it became clear that answers to that question might invariably involve the concept of, or even just the word "socialism", those discussions, in our fair, free and open capitalist society, seem to have been simply shut down.
Does it rate a mention in even Economics 101 these days?

The essence of the working conditions factor is the statement, "...sweatshops are awful, but working a tiny rice farm is clearly worse." That same issue relates to practically all developing countries that are trying to become exporters. The key idea is really a modern adaptation of Einstein's "theory of relativity." Working conditions, like happiness, wealth, comfort, hunger, or even fear, are "relative" terms, relative to their own culture, not the developed world's.

China and the other Asian tigers are only observed because of their massive industrial complex, fast growth, and the clear co-dependence of the West and Asia: without the West's ability to create ideas, inventions, technology, consumer products, and consume them, Asia would quickly lose its ability to produce. It relies on heavily on copying (legally or otherwise), ideas created in the West's free enterprise culture. But the bottom line is that without that co-dependence, Asia would contract from industrialism back to agriculture, and workers would indeed be working harder and longer hours, and living much poorer.

Without considering "relative" factors of culture when discussing working conditions, we're only looking at half of the circle and trying to find where it ends.

Would it be fair to ask our millionaire "job creators" where they invested their windfall Bush tax break for the wealthy, in place over the last decade? Did they invest in Chinese sweat shops, or India´s infamous child labor enterprises, or in slave-powered plantations in Africa? Or did they invest in America? Let´s start with Mitt Romney.

We never learn! This article about the horrid working conditions in Chinese factories and the even more horrid working, and living, conditions on the farms is no different than the contrast between the Dickensian factory jobs in England in the early 19th century and the even more horrible life one had on the farms then.

We need a new, but Chinese, Karl Marx to point out the obvious.

"This is pretty weird, and it's hard to believe it isn't a temporary deviation from the norm. At some point iPhones are going to be assembled by robots, not people trying to imitate robots."

I think the difference here is that the product lifecycle on smartphones is half that of a desktop. Even then, it wouldn't surprise me if there's greater continuity between successive generations of iMac than there is between successive generations of iPhone. If you have to replace your iPhone-making robots every 6 months, but your iMac-making robots every 2-4 years, it's far more likely that you'll use people to assemble the phones.

Yes, when the average Chinese factory worker can afford the iPhone (or VW, or...) (s)he is assembling, the Chinese economy will rapidly mature and Foxconn will be investing heavily in robots (if they still have the contract from Apple, that is.)
Actually, despite this 'hiccup' the future, with robots and 3D printers, is rapidly evolving into something in which very little human labor is required. I suppose our children and grandchildren will all sell services to each other, or indulge in all that leisure time we were supposed to have by now...

Good article but could someone please tell me who owns Foxconn and who profits from the cheap labor.

In the past we've supported banana republics, so what's wrong with iPad republics?

In other words, US consumers don't care.
Just give them their "cool" toys at a cheap price.
And give them the credit to buy it.

And you are not "with it" if you don't have the latest toy.
(According to the advertisers on Madison Avenue.)

Regards