This is a strawman.
You're conflating different groups of people with different interests. Some people complain about labor conditions, some people complain that jobs are leaving the country. Almost nobody is "dishonest" about this.
My point was people who care about labor rights, shipping jobs offshore, etc are selective about those specific issues. Never said they had to care about other issues.
My point was that people are inconsistent due to the intersection between their advocacy and their own sense of nationalism. The issues are amplified when they pertain to Americas enemies and lessened when it pertains to Americas Allies.
For a specific example, I did a quick search and Malaysia is one. Malaysia has the same or worst labor practices then China, but no one complains about tech companies relying on Malaysia's poor labor practices.
A blog post that talks about it. https://medium.com/swlh/forced-labor-in-tech-c91daf979201
Also the slave labor in US itself, https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...
Everybody is a hypocrite on almost every issue. Take a major issue like climate change. Almost every human in the U.S. and Europe has massively large carbon footprints. Does that mean Americans or Europeans can’t care about climate change? We’re not ideal beings working in an ideal system. We’re flawed being in a flawed system trying to make things a little better.
To me, your argument, fully constructed, is: “you can’t care that Uyghur’s are enslaved because America also uses slave labor and American foreign policy is anti-China.” How is that an argument?
But no, Jim Bob isn't a hypocrite if the information was never brought before him. Jim Bob does become a hypocrite when the information is in front of him and refuses to acknowledge it.
Let’s be honest, people complaining about labor conditions have a pretty weak understanding of economics and what is actually going on with regards to these factories. China isn’t stupid. They weaken their currency specifically to bring in the cheap labor jobs to lift the poorest to a slightly less poor tier. Unless you realize how poor they started out with it’s hard to appreciate the gains in wealth even if it still looks dirt poor to an armchair labor rights activist.
Is there any other option?
Don't stop people from complaining about lead in the water supply, just because they have nothing else to drink.
This kind of reminds me of the plot of The Good Place [spoiler warning] -- in the show it's essentially impossible to get to Heaven because every decision you make has transitive dependencies on awful labor practices, abusive behaviors, and other unseemly things. So everyone ends up in Hell.
I don't think using a smartphone built with evil labor practices is inherently evil. But buying one every year when you could use one for 5 years is probably a bit evil.
Economists hardly understand the economy, so I’d say they’re in good company…
Jokes aside, demanding better treatment of workers and onshoring of jobs doesn’t seem as insane as people here are making it seem? This whole thread feels kind of irrelevant.
99% of everyone has a phone made in China, does this mean it's not possible to complain about the state of the world we live in?
It is virtue signaling, largely to placate and pat themselves on the back to deflect blame from them, that their consumption, their vote with their money, and unwillingness to pay the true cost, is what creates this situation.
HUGE "citation needed" here. Apple did a study years ago (when Obama was President) and the cost to manufacture iPhones in the US was well under 10% of the total cost, by their own calculations.
The cost of labor in China has only gotten worse since then (hence the move to Vietnam in the OP).
No longer the case obviously but more importantly, Apple studied themselves and found they were only saving 10% in costs? This makes no sense lol
(The US, like China, also runs concentration camps. As far as I can tell there is no country on Earth that uniformly preserves human rights.)