Tuesday, December 11, 2012

The new American sweat-shops...to be American

From the Financial Times (7th December 2012):  Apple up as Mac production to return to US from China. Tim Cook, Apple chief executive, revealed plans for the company to return some of its manufacturing back to the US. Mr Cook said Apple would spend $100 million next year to shift parts of its Mac computer manufacturing back to the US from China.
Capitalism originally outsourced its manufacturing to China because costs too high in USA but now wages and other costs going up in China but because of the recession dropping in the US so they're  bringing part of the manufacturing back.

Cindy Sui of BBC Business News, Taipei: wrote (9th December 2012)
According to some estimates, labour costs in China have risen by an average rate of between 12% and 15% annually over the past five years. The authorities are hoping that by letting more migrant workers in, and allowing factories to pay them lower rates than the minimum wage, they will be able to attract some of the firms - who are now starting to see their costs in China go up
BBC Radio 4 Today programme (10th December 2012) explained : iPhone “reflects China's relationship with US”. Both the US and China have a problem - China consumes too little of what it produces, and when demand for exports fall, its economy can stall.  America has the opposite problem - it produces too little of what it consumes

Chris Anderson, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, told them: "You can see the history of manufacturing in the back of Apple products. The back of the iPhone says: 'Designed in California, assembled in China'. And that largely describes the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, which is to say that China had so successfully built a world-beating manufacturing model with initially cheap labour, great engineering, very dense supply chains, everything you needed to make an iPhone and products like it."

Steve Clayton

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