Well, here's a great example of why western corps go to China

[HEyHEY]

http://autos.globaltimes.cn/china/2010-05/536247_2.html

Yup, Honda paying people 800 yuan a month. I live here and I have spent 800 yuan in a night before. That is insanely low pay. My girlfriend rents and apartment for 1,200 in Beijing and let me tell you, it ain't a nice one.

Then they just fire the guys behind the strike and try out all this other shit that would never fly in the west. Remember this when buying a car!

[jtuck004]

1. Thank you for that. Though I suspect less and less people will be

buying a car. It is useful information to realize what may happen to this economy, however. Have to readjust so we can live on $800 a month. Less mcmansions, less suv's, less...

I was actually wondering what an apartment cost near Foxconn the other day, so this is timely. And food seems slightly less expensive, and less processed, than in the U.S.

[HEyHEY]

2. Well, 800 rmb is about 120 bucks

And there's ALOT of stuff in Beijing that costs the same as back home.

[Jkid]

3. Give me a few examples.

[HEyHEY]

4. A tubeof toothpaste

Cost about $1.20 USD here, a cup of coffee is the same as back home. So, if you're making 800 rmb a month, could you imagine paying 25 kuai for a cup of coffee?

Even if you live the chinese lifestyle, I can't picture you paying less than 500 kuai a month for rent. So, that would leave these people 300 kuai a month for food, and they'd want to save some money, right? So let's say 200 kuai a month for food. It's inhumane.

[girl gone mad]

5. Plus, despite the rampant slave wages..

China is facing waves of hyperinflation, including a massive speculation-fueled housing bubble. At the salary these workers make, it would take a lifetime to buy a 50 sf apt.

[Jkid]

7. Unless you have the right connections

And those connections means joining the Chinese "Communist" Party, or being born into a family whose parents are members of the Chinese "Communist" Party.

[sandnsea]

6. International Workers Rights

Until workers in this country realize that the only way to guarantee their standard of living is to fight againt exploitation in every country, the corporations will just continue to hop from country to country. By the time they're done, they can come back to the US.

[jtuck004]

8. I do understand about workers rights, but

in one report I read they expected over 200 million Chinese to move rural to urban areas, because even at 800 yuan a month their standard of living was better than on the farm, or at least they hoped it would be. I think the government is encouraging this as well. A later report seemed to intimate that even more had moved than they projected, and it was continuing.

We have 30 million people unemployed, or under employed.

I don't think less worker exploitation is impossible, but there are a few things to consider. The Chinese government has been known to shoot protestors down in the street, so be careful. But that's nothing compared to the the sheer demographics of 200 million Chinese willing to work for $800 a month (that's what they are paying _engineers_ at the new Applied Materials plant). That's a huge differential to overcome when you are trying to re-employ 30 million people here 30 to $60,000 a year. And people here still need to feed themselves and their families and pay taxes while supporting the fight against worker exploitation elsewhere.

But the goal is to provide for the people here, so perhaps we could educate the 30 million here to create small corporations with less overhead and profits, work for less money, own the assets. I wonder if they could compete?

The idea as sold many years ago is that we would outsource the labor and the people that were unemployed would be educated into areas that required higher education. But we didn't put the resources in, didn't prepare people, and here we are. And it is likely to continue for at least the next 10 years.

Or maybe we can sell insurance to each other.

[TheMadMonk]

9. We were sold the idea that workers made redundant would be "educated"...

...into other fields.

And the fact that we as a whole were stupid enough to buy it, is all the proof needed to show it was a non-flier.

Some people truly are only suited to manual labour, to factory work, to jobs where education past basic literacy and numeracy is worthless.

The greatest savings to be made in outsourcing labour are not with the relatively few higher wage earners but the great number of low wage earners. The plan was always to cut the largest part of the workforce and no one saw anything wrong with this.

[Vinnie From Indy]

10. Agreed!

This is not rocket science. Wal-Mart showed the way for other corporations to cut costs by offshoring work and forced many, many other companies to do just that or lose Wal-Mart as a distributor of their products.

In short, the vast majority of Americans have no idea that they have been, for the most part, abandoned by global corporations who no longer want or need us as workers and for the first time in the last 100 years no longer need us as consumers. These jobs will not come back and the next 50 years will see a dramatic drop in our standard of living.