This american life, one of my favorite radio shows (even though its a public radio show) recently aired an episode called “mr. daisy goes to the apple factory.” While the show’s hosts are usually pretty professional journalists who distance themselves personally from the topics, this episode seems rife with emotional appeal and economic error. Its an hour long but I think it attacks capitalism from a much different direction than most of us are used to. So, I was hoping I could get some feedback from some of yall regarding some of the arguements made in the episode. Thankfully its pretty entertaining and funny at times so I think you will enjoy it anyway as well as finding merit in the challenge. As much as we hate to acknowledge emotional appeal, we must remember that emotional appeal is the most powerful so I want to be prepared for this bullshit.
Until “exploited” workers have guns pointed to their heads my views on employer-employee relationships won’t change. Those workers voluntarily chose to work there. No one forced them to work for Apple.
- Why is Apple producing phones, tablets etc in China instead of Sylicon Valley or Texas? After all due to much superior capital investment an IT worker in the US has much superior productivity to a Chinese laborer. The answer? Apple did the math and found out assembling consumers products in China is just cheaper than in the US. This is due to a myriad of facts: consumers electronics change often and hence it’s just not economical to invest a ton of capital when relatively unskilled laborers can do the job just fine, labor costs and legislation makes hiring unskilled laborers in the US much more expensive than in China, Apple is a worldwide brand and chose a single location to assemble products for a global market, the factory is nearer to the myriad of subcontractors building parts etc.
2)Why are Chinese laborers treated so badly by Western standards? The reason is very simple: workers know very well there are literally millions of starving persons living in China’s countryside ready to take their place at the drop of a hat. Also the productivity of the average Chinese laborer makes him/her easily replaceable: after all they do not bring a unique set of skills nor do they carry with them a high capital investment. Another person can do the job just fine. In this respect Chinese laborers are very akin to laborers in English factories at the close of the XVIII century: due to their low skills and a vast supply of similarly skilled worker they cannot afford to be picky. Take what you are given or starve. Unions in Europe became powerful not because they staged protests but because they realized skilled workers with a unique set of skills are much harder to replace and hence can obtain better working conditions and wages.
3)Why doesn’t the Chinese government “step in” to improve working conditions? Apart from the Chinese leadership’s peculiar quirks (the same they had under the Ming Dynasty or Mao), the Chinese leadership realizes it cannot give away one of their own country’s advantages (cheap unskilled labor) by arbitrarily raising wages. Raise wages and foreigners will go back home (where workers are much more productive due to high capital investment) or simply pick another country with a huge mass of cheap unskilled labor. There are plenty of those.
If you have any more specific questions just shoot away.
The interesting part is that Apple products are only assembled in China. The components are produced in places like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. These are not low-wage countries, and it’s not done with unskilled labor. In other words, production of IT equipment does require skilled, high-wage labor and extensive capital. We just made it impossible to have those jobs in the US because we added the cost of all those “free” lunches.
But why is it that Chinese workers are so unproductive and replaceable that they can be treated by 18th century standards? Is this just some curious coincidence of history? Maybe they are poor because they had fewer natural resources, or because they are lazy? No. The answer is that it’s because of socialism! Chinese people were literally banned, by their government, from engaging in productive activity, which means they never managed to accumulate the capital or gain the skills necessary to become that productive. Without high productity, they could not bargain for better conditions.
So all this time the lefties are complaining that evil capitalism is treating people badly, they aren’t considering that this is purely the fault of socialism in the first place. The west has better working conditions than China because we have less socialism. If we had done what the socialists wanted, we would still have such working conditions in the west. Yet for some reason working conditions in China are generally considered proof that we need more socialism. How friggin backwards is this?
Exactly.
It was not my original idea to tackle the issue why people in China’s countryside are still starving and freezing to death in the XXI century but you covered it pretty well.