Direct Action. What'd you think?

Originally posted by jaguar

You don't seem to realsie jsut how much is made third world...If you went round your house and itiimsed every item and where it was made you'd get a pretty damn long list. Probably a serious proportion of clothes, appliances or part of them more often), shoes, building materials, parts of your car often, parts of *so many* things its not funny. If they all had to be manufactured in the first world the cost would be anything from 2x to 20x, the impact on price - huge resulting in many not being able to afford things they previously took for granted. Forget primary resources - i'm speaking purely in labour terms - and the fact is we exploit cheaper overseas labour to lower costs - therefore without that cheper labour first world costs in a very large spectrum of good world be markedly higher.

First -

You can't really assert that I have a lot of third-world made things. To be honest, I really probably don't - I have lots of computer shit, and, uh... American made clothes. Shoes/boots from England. That's really about it. I'm going to buy a Volvo car, which made all in Sweden.

Sure, some things, though, probably come from really really cheap labor. Is this an injustice? We can't really know. In Botswana, I'm sure the local bosses aren't paying the equivalent of USD $5.15/hour for minimum wage either... they're just not making enough money. It's all about looking at the context. Fact of the matter is, some places, the dollar goes a hell of a lot farther. So they may be making great money *for where they live* - we simply can't know.

Now. Suppose their labor price went up. Look at it this way.

Imagine Apple computers had their stuff manufactured in, uh, Malaysia or something. And instead of paying some guy $15/hour to assemble computers here, they're paying some dude in Malaysia $3/hour. Imagine it takes about, oh, we'll round up and say TWO WHOLE HOURS to put a machine together (which it doesn't, unless you're grossly slow or you're taking pictures). Therefore, their cost is $6 per computer for the actual assembly process. Now, if he gets a raise to, say, $10/hour 'cause he's doing good work (and that's probably good money over there - shit, it's not half bad for over here), it costs Apple $20/computer, or $14 more.

So, they raise the price of each box from $1,699 to $1,713.

BFD.

Fact of the matter is, I don't think the prices would increase *that much* - all the business has to do is increase the prices to suit the added labor cost. Since labor is such a small part of manufacturing like that, I really don't see it as driving costs up so high. Seriously.