In China, it can be argued that this represents progress over the alternative, which would likely be rural poverty. The alternative might be 16-hour days, without anything resembling a dorm.
Again, I understand the disgust, but sweatshops are part of our economic history too. The question is whether it is a necessary (and net-positive) step. It might be.
Eventually they will run out of their supply of peasants fresh off the farm and things will change. Or robots will take over, which happens first is anyone's bet.
1) Many of the companies are with working with low profit margins, i.e. the profit margin is <5%. With rising costs in both raw supplies and worker wages + low demand from abroad, many of these companies are being driven out of business due to their decreasing profit margin.
2) Since rising costs are eating into companies' profit margins, many companies are looking at relocating their manufacturing base from China to countries with [even] cheaper manual labor. For example, Foxconn has recently inked a multi-billion w/ Brazilian gov't to produce ipads and apple related products there. Other companies are looking to relocate their manufacturing base to SE asian countries like Vietnam where cheap labor and gov't wiling to bend the rules for FDI are still aplenty.
Like you said. We'll see what happens.
So that's probably not the case for Foxconn as well.
[1]: Which according to Wikipedia is more in US dollars than what a typical Chinese worker in Shenzen earns in a month, US$ 390.93 versus US$ 208.32
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/13/us-brazil-foxconn-...
As you can see in the link in the sibling comment, the overhead of employing people in Brazil is quite big. Besides, there's also additional overhead due to a myriad of non-labour-related taxes, and living cost and the minimum wage are significantly higher than in China and SE Asia.
So while we do have a large industrial base, it's not like we have factories for every kind of product just because of protectionist tariffs.
That results in the curious situation of having to pay (say) U$1000 in Brazil for some Chinese-made product that can be had for U$500 in the US.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/30/foxconns-brazil-ipa...
...and yet most people are still not sure if their clothing / food / gadget / jewellery was produced ethically.
For sure, there's stuff like fair trade, and "Ethical Consumer", but these are still niche products.
It seems many people are happy to offload those dirty low paid over worked unsafe jobs to other countries.
It was the intellectual enlightenment that modernized Europe. Slavery is not a transitory "stage" it typically lasts for thousands of years.
It sucks that things seem to work that way, but it looks like China is moving in the right direction here, not the wrong direction. At some point (as was the case in all the countries I mentioned) they will demand and receive there rights. There is evidence of this happening in China already.
At least all the Foxconn workers all agreed to work at Foxconn, which implies that their alternatives were worse. There are countless millions of others in the world who aren't so lucky.
I don't think remittances were ever a significant source of income. It's not like patterns of emigration seen with other countries, where one or the other parent leaves and sends money back to the family, and eventually returns. If anything, remittances were used to fund further emigration, so that families could join up abroad. Ireland's population still hasn't recovered from the famine of the 1850s.
Correct. There are many incidents in southern China (e.g. Guandong, wenzhou, and other cities with a large factory presence) where workers have gone on strikes to protest for fairer wages and better benefits.
Also, I read a NY times articles (can't recall the link off the top of my head) where Chinese factories were competing against each other for qualified workers. As a result, workers were given higher salaries and better benefits.
Well said. I would highly suggest that people watch the documentary "the last train home" (available on Netflix streaming), where it shows you the mentality of migrant workers who leave rural China for factory jobs in urban China.