Riot breaks out at Foxconn's Taiyuan plant
engadget.com
engadget.com
Then one after the other factories became more machine centric and less labor intensive before they started moving east and the west became richer and less dependent on creating physical products.
Now we have become acclimatized to cheap production in the east at a time of great segregation between the rich and the poor. And protests and riots will have to continue until we realize that our luxury lives are still dependent on 10, 100, maybe 1000 other people who have to live in poverty.
The next chapter in this book are unions (well that was the chapter that followed urban migration in many other countries) where the workers, demanding a fair wage for their work strike and stop production. This chapter can't start until there aren't enough underpaid agri-workers to fill the positions, but once there are, look out.
How all of that plays out in a totalitarian regime is not well understood at all. In the US and elsewhere the folks to took union organizers out behind a shed and shot them were eventually brought to justice and punished, enough so that the practice became too risky for the factories. It has been suggested that in highly corrupt or complicit governments that correcting force (justice for organizers against being shot) may prevent the formation of effective unions. And how that plays out on the world scene is even less well known since Europe and the US went through the union chapter when there wasn't instantaneous communication around the world.
Interesting times indeed.
The Chinese leadership is aware that the basis of its continued legitimacy the miracle of well over 600 million people being lifted out of poverty since 1980. (A humanitarian achievement that arguably rivals any other in history)
Whether it is violent crackdowns on dissent or widespread work stoppages, the economic fallout would threaten that narrative.
Though cheap labor is an advantage over other manufacturing centers, it is the incredible size that creates the flexibility to immediately scale up production on short notice that might make these super factories stand out even more to clients. If that is the case, until factories of the same magnitude are built in countries with even cheaper labor, there may be room for significant wage growth among the workers.
Read up how BYD started up. It is very enlightening. The west had modern battery factories yet couldn't compete with BYD on the price of it's hand made batteries.
But even if you take liberal/market ideology at face value, they're still being underpaid. To have a free market you've got to have free people. If you agitate for more workplace protections or (god forbid) try to start an independent labor union, getting shot or sent to a prison camp in the far western provinces of China isn't out of the question. This decreases labor's bargaining power relative to what it would be in a free market, which decreases wages.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/01/12/chinese-foxc...
It is obvious they feel underpaid. It is their interest to get the most pay for their labour as they can get. Doesn't mean that the economy can afford to pay them more. Nor does it mean they would be paid more with a different unskilled job. China's struggle is that it has a massive surplus of unskilled labourers. The only way they can keep these people employed is by producing unskilled jobs for a low cost.
What is an example of an unskilled job? Sticking stickers on products. How much does it cost to get a machine to do it? $X. Then if a human wants to do it they must be to do at a comparable cost, otherwise market forces will eliminate his job. China is leaving low value manufacturing in coastal regions (where most of the manufacturing is done due to lower logistic costs). The unskilled migrant workers who haven't made their saving yet, and don't soon, are going to be far worse off in the future as they will have less earning opportunity and will be competing additional against logistic costs.
Many people fail to understand that things won't start costing more if unskilled Chinese labour would cost more. What would happen is we would start using simple machines to do the work and there would be less unskilled Chinese jobs available (leading to a slowdown of the Chinese economy). Dish washer machines are rare in restaurants in China due to the cost of labour being comparable or less than a machine.
A libertarian view would have the state remove any barriers (short of money) that would prevent an individual from improving their own skills.
A traditional capitalist view would have the state provide enough educational opportunity to become 'minimally skilled' and achieve a living wage.
A socialist view would add to the capitalist view with a support network for folks with additional disadvantages such as learning disabilities or other impairments.
A communist view would provide jobs regardless of skill even if the product produced nothing of economic value.
A despotic or corrupt view would empower people to enslave others to increase their economic output as long as it didn't make the state 'look bad' to the international press.
Its a spectrum (more like a 3D surface) with folks all over the map. So far there have been few long term successes when the laborers were not able to improve their own skill sets, and some pretty spectacular failures when the labor pool was artificially prevented from improving itself.
If someone can't become skilled through training and education, they should be given work that doesn't require education (say, a janitor). Makes that person feel more useful vs just giving them unemployment checks for staying home.
There is an interesting 'post period benefit capture' issue that comes up. Lets say you're a young rebel and fritter away your youth rebelling rather than learning. Sadly in the US a lot of these folks end up either in the criminal justice system or on the marginalized edge of society. There are some great programs run by ex-gang members in LA [1] that tries to give people the skills they need, after they realize they need them, which may be much later than when the 'system' would normally provide. Adults going back for a GED and then on to college for additional skills.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Tattoos-Heart-Power-Boundless-Compassi...
For example, moms and dads riding rickety bikes to and fro work, etc. rather than buying a car on credit or taking hand-me-downs without second thoughts from relatives and so on and using the saved money instead to put their children thru school or pay for after school cram schools. Not to say that doesn't happen in North America, but here it's more exceptional than in China, as far as I could tell.
It is one thing to move production to save money from wage differences, and quite another to then turn a blind eye to the working conditions of your new employees under the guise of it being the suppliers problem.
Also, it is worth remembering that although Apple is a major customer of Foxconn's and has some of the most leverage with them (which is why it is really is worth annoying Apple about this), they are hardly the only people who make use of Foxconn and that there are also a lot worse places than Foxconn that do not have such a strong light shone upon them, and that are usually forgotten quickly even when they make the news.
The last riot at Foxconn started with a dispute in between a worker and a local restaurant owner. Ended with a 1000 man riot. Nothing to do with Foxconn worker rights.
Such riots can't be equivocated with workers flighting for greater rights. They aren't. They want more money. Most the disputes are about broken promises of overtime work, as the workers make their best money from overtime. The workers don't live anywhere near the factories. They just work there for a few years to take money back to the villages where their families and friends live. They want money to improve families living conditions, not the factory that they don't give a damn about. They would trade factory conditions for more money almost any time, as the factory conditions are just temporary for them. They want to reach their goal of saving $X, go home, and enjoy their lives with their family and friends.
What I am saying is not universal in China. The Chinese government controls migration and in some locations factories can only employ local people. In such factories labour costs are much higher and workers do receive much better working conditions. This story is not about such a factory.
Several of my friends have spent years working in China and they all comment about how almost no one believes in individualism in the same way that the average American does; that they don't care about civil rights or liberties (or give lip service to such ideals). That really does sound "different than us" to me.
Probably not. Why would it be 100% cultural and 0% biological? Because it makes you uncomfortable to admit any other possibility? I'm sorry, but reality doesn't care about your comfort level. It could be 100% cultural and 0% biological, or 90/10, or 50/50, or 20/80. I don't believe that the 100/0 scenario is very likely, because--despite your baseless assertion to the contrary--there are in fact real biological differences between East Asians and Europeans (or East Asians and South Asians, or any other racial group).
This is just a rephrasing of the original baseless assertion. The relative contribution of genetic and cultural factors to group differences is not at all clear.
I simply pointed out that this is not clear at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_mentality
Watch the video of this riot ( http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDUzOTYzMzQ0.html ) and tell me that it isn't clear signs of mob mentality. The pictures of the damage look bad but when you see the video it looks like a social gathering with people laughing (e.g. ~0:35) and nothing really going on, other than a handful of hooligans causing damage.
Here's a bunch of mostly white Canadians having a riot http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VzOUKODdZ4
I am trying to work out whether you are more of a bigot than an imbecile or vice-versa. At the moment I wouldn't be willing to bet either way.
For example, a foreigner in Zhengzhou in Henan was thought to have slapped a girl on a scooter. When an angry mob formed, he locked himself in his car. Video shows hundreds of angry Chinese people yelling staring at him though the car windows. When they saw a Walmart badge on his chest, they decided that he was American and started calling him "American devil". He had to be escorted to safety by local police to avoid being dragged out of the car and beaten.
But only the smallest fraction of people there had actually seen the alleged incident. The "badge" on his chest was actually a Walmart brochure sticking out of his chest pocket. I contacted Walmart media relations and they were aware of the incident, but the man had no affiliation with them.
That, I find, is the way it typically happens. Chinese people are already angry and resentful about something, and then something sets them off. It doesn't matter if the "something" has little to nothing to do with whatever they were angry about.
I could reply by pointing out similar behaviour in countries all over the world, it is a common human trait, not something that is somehow peculiar to China.
Out of interest, have you ever read "Orientalism" by Edward Said? As this discussion could almost be an example from it.
Maybe, maybe not. I see no reason to give the privileged position of "default" to the belief that all large populations of human beings are, on average, the same as all other large populations of human beings. Women and men are inherently different. Asians and Arabs are inherently different. All groups of people are very similar to one another, yes, but there's no reason to believe that they're the same, or that they'd be the same if not for environmental factors. Why would you believe such a thing?
As for my specific claim that the behaviour of attacking as a mob without good information is a common human trait rather than being something peculiar to Chinese culture, I am not saying that it is a universal human trait as there certainly seem to be individuals who do not tend to do this, but I know of no large culture in which this does not happen.
[edit] Also, your example of women and men being inherently different is not as good a one as you may suspect. Hermaphrodites exist and somewhat confuse any attempt at a clear delineation.
This is called Lewontin's Fallacy. Take height, for example. You can find a man and a woman who are both 5'2", while the average height for women is somewhere around 5'7" and for men somewhere around 5'10". Indeed, the "difference between large populations"--in this case, three inches' difference in average height between men and women--pales in comparison to the "difference within those populations": the height of a healthy adult male can be anywhere from 5' to 7'.
In other words, there can be great variation within either or both of two large populations, and yet statistically significant inherent differences can exist between the averages of those populations.
You should look at the anti-Japan riots videos from the past month. My not so clear point was that the Chinese riots have a lot less hooligans. When one talks of Chinese riots one should not imagine they are behaving like football hooligans.
See this for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKnuILXFVZI and the article's video. You'll get what I mean.
Oh, don't worry, I get what you mean. You may be incoherent, but you are far from subtle.
It's as if one might expect people who buy a burger from McDonald's to go ahead and give the half way difference between what a burger costs at McDonald's and a Gourment burger joint (assuming McD pays its employees around minimum wage and the Gourment joint pays more) to McD's workers "to be fair".
If China feels it's in its interest not to bolster its labor laws and not to vigorously enforce those it has, then leaving it up to individual companies to unilaterally take up the good cause is not an effective policy. The central government could fix all these issues, but it feels they are subservient to other issues. Mandating higher wages risks making automation more attractive which would dispossess these marginal workers. Foxconn as it is, is exploring this alternative as they witness wage inflation.
Why would Volkswagen, Toyota, Dell, Hitachi, Samsung, even Huawei, etc., unilaterally require that their OEMs pay their (OEMs's not actually the foreign firms's) employees any more than they do when doing so would put them at a disadvantage vis a vis other OEMs and those customers who do not pay higher wages? Let's say Acer picked up the good cause but no one else did, Acer would eventually lose to the others due to higher costs. It's not as though the OEMs and their customers need to compete for labor.
http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/china-in-revolt/
Extremely interesting, especially if you enjoy reading left perspectives on global labor issues. The tldr of it is that Chinese workers aren't simply exploited, culturally-destined to obedience, and at the mercies of Western oligarchs and do-gooders: they're actively molding and negotiating their own rights and fates, though they still face their own unique challenges.
The article linked to by parent is interesting, although the vocabulary is leftist.
You know how Western economies generate around 70 to 80% of gdp from activity within their borders (exceptions being Canada and NZ because of extraction industries). When China gets near that percentage, will they need this cheap assembly and fabrication work?
Example: Anti-Japan riots. 1000s of Chinese. One Lexus. Barely any damage even using hammers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKnuILXFVZI&feature=relat...
On the topic of whether Foxconn workers are underpaid, they are clearly not - they perform work of exceptionally low value, most of which is performed by hand for no reason other than that Chinese peasants are cheaper than machines. Foxconn operates on very low margins and earns only a tiny fraction of the retail price of the devices they manufacture. The value in consumer electronics is primarily R&D; Without the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in microelectronics research, these workers would still be peasants and their American and European counterparts would be working 10-hour shifts manufacturing vacuum tubes and phonograph needles.
Maybe more accurate to call this a group fight with a few thousand spectators. Like I said earlier comments earlier most people seemed to be pretty calm.