Nicholas Wilczynski
The word Inequality is a very general term, but most of the aspects of inequality are related and even serve to reinforce one another.
For over a decade Southeastern China has been the manufacturing capital of the cheap labor movement. This has been challenged though in the last year with worker suicides on the production floor of Foxconn's China factories leading to higher wages in that area.
And so there has begun a exodus of Foxconn's competitors. Flextronics chief among them as far as companies focused on foreign markets but mostly companies focused on the emerging Chinese consumer base, have started placing their factories in inland China, where the workers have less bargaining power.
This is mostly about inequality in bargaining power, you can see it in the initial migration of industrial manufacturing jobs when they left the U.S. where Unions were protected and the workers had well established bargaining power. In search of the lowest wages these companies have consistently sought out this inequality of bargaining power so that they could convert it into inequality in manufacturing costs. However this particular story raises the idea that far from a race to the bottom, by seeking out and becoming dependant on low wages the manufacturers instead slowly inflate labor costs by empowering the low wage workers with jobs and any wages at all.
If this is the case then world Capitalism might have a shot. Although I also note with some irony that by fleeing the high wage areas and diminishing the jobs available there the domestic Chinese companies endanger their own prospective consumer base.
Source:
International Business Times
Inequality
Nicholas Wilczynski
No comments:
Post a Comment