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dangustoday at 5:12 AM1 replyview on HN

Factory wages in China are almost $2 more per hour than factory labor in Mexico.

I don't buy this argument.

Sure, labor protections in China are weak, but let's use our mirrors: the US has no guaranteed paid time off of any kind, it has unions on paper only, 1 in 10 Americans have no health insurance, and it's nearly the only country where medical bankruptcy exists as a concept. The largest employer in the US runs a scheme where their workers are intentionally kept part-time with low enough wages to need SNAP assistance and other social safety net programs, as well as avoiding any obligation to provide health insurance, effectively subsidizing their corporate profits with tax dollars. America's middle class has been shrinking via housing, healthcare, and education cost inflation while China's middle class has been growing as its industries have continually moved further up the value chain.

"China is just cheap labor" is a last-Millennium viewpoint. China is a manufacturing ecosystem where you can walk into a physical marketplace and find rows of vendors with skilled technicians who all know how to work on electronic or machinery or other manufacturing skills, where they offer services like chip-level NAND upgrades where they solder on storage upgrades to your iPhone while you wait.

China is now a country where you would pay a price premium to buy their products over competitors.


Replies

Synaesthesiatoday at 7:00 AM

Yeah but China is a low cost economy, rent, food and things like transport and electricity are cheap. That means employers simply can pay workers less than the USA because the cost of living is so high in the USA.

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