Workers on Samsung factory site battle police in Vietnam
cbc.caGoogle Translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=vi&tl=en&u=ht...
English article from "The Hindu": http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/workers-building-s...
The Hindu article mentions 4 injured, but not 8 dead. Is there another source on the 8 dead figure?
This is the best source I can find.
"11 people were injured, 5 of them seriously"
http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/20140109-11-injured...
Ah, so its workers building the plant, not the workers manufacturing their products.
It's not good publicity either way...
No, not at all. Like the other article linked by nodata, companies are moving from China to Vietnam because its cheaper. Seems a little greedy.
Except it's not. China has reached the stage in economic development that people are moving to higher skilled and higher paying jobs. Infrastructure in Vietnam has improved to the extent that is ready for large manufacturing plants.
While companies are saving by moving manufacturing plants, many people (millions) in Vietnam are going to experience higher standard of living. I say it's a win win.
Except for the people they'll lay off as the plants move? It didn't work out wonderfully for the autoplant workers at Flint and Detroit; for some reason, the people didn't get the upgrade you speak of after the plants closed. Weird, huh?
If we kept thinking like that all our clothes would be hand-woven.
> many people (millions) in Vietnam are going to experience higher standard of living.
Aren't therefore many people (millions) in China going to experience lower standard of living?
The economy is not a zero-sum game.
The economy isn't magical either; jobs lost in one region because the factories closed and moved to another aren't necessarily going to be recouped by new job creation in a short span of time.
Then we should probably do what we can to help the worst off in the economy, whether they've lost their jobs due to new technology, moving factories, or whatever, rather than trying to nail the factories down to one particular place.
>help the worst off in the economy
The problem with this is, the "factory owners" of the world run a political machine which they use to prevent that from happening, claiming it prevents them from building more factories. They use the same political machine to establish the moral goodness of continued factory building as axiomatic.
This makes everything rather complicated.
> the "factory owners" of the world run a political machine
Well, yes and no. The view I espoused was pretty similar to what Warren Buffet says, and that guy has owned a factory or two in his day. Even in the US, which has less government, there are a number of programs for those who don't have much. Perhaps you'd like to see more - fair enough - but the exact level of support is open for debate, isn't it? I don't think we'll ever agree on precisely what it should consist of. The Nordic states seem to work pretty well with more government. Probably depends on a lot of factors...
So I don't think there's any big cabal, really.
There doesn't need to be a cabal. But then I suppose that means "run," "use" and "machine" were pretty poor word choices.
"There exists a System, in which we are all but cogs" doesn't seem a very useful way of analysing the world, however correct we might suspect it is. Maybe I should try harder.
Yes, government intervention does make things rather complicated.
Ah, the old "when I no longer have to suffer the indignity of taxation I will donate half my money to the poor" argument. I wonder why I find it so hard to believe that the bottomless greed of capital will suddenly evaporate when we give them the entirely greed-based anarcho-capitalist society they want?
But I agree with you that "factory owners" and "government" are basically the same people. That's what I was referring to by the political machine I mentioned above, although it extends far beyond government.
Moving plants is not what the link you are linking to talks about.
And in fact, what you are linking to is a right-wing attack on very legitimate economic ideas. The introduction of the 40-hour week did increase employment, and further reduction of work weeks would indeed increase the number of people employed (as we see already: all job growth in the U.S. currently is full-time jobs being converted into multiple part-time jobs in the service industry).
That is, you've linked to a discussion of something on Wikipedia and you believe that the discussion of it proves its truthfulness; nothing could be further from the truth. See also: discussion of moon landing conspiracies.
In fact, if I fire someone in China and hire someone in Vietnam, I have indeed engaged in a zero-sum transaction - actually a negative-sum transaction, since I'll be paying the Vietnamese guy less than the Chinese guy. Overall, the world economy will be moving slower because of my actions.
If the economy were zero-sum, we would be far poorer today, with 7 billion people, than 200 years ago, when there were only 1 billion people, right?
I don't believe in things like "the market will sort everything out", by the way. There are winners and losers, and I think society has some duty to help take care of those who get the short end of the stick. But I don't think "don't let the factories move" is the right way to help those people, long term.
Not really, because they are moving to higher paying jobs than assembly-line work.
Not all of them. Only the luckiest ones. 1-10% probably. The rest got laid off.
> China has reached the stage in economic development that people are moving to higher skilled and higher paying jobs.
Yeah... 'caus that worked for Mexico... can China look forward to a descent into drug traficking fueled civil war now?
It's actually working pretty well for most Mexicans, just not the minority who live near the US border.
With "working well", you mean, dozens how thousands of violent kills over the last years in the entire country, routine murdering of journalists and policemen, and essentially total corruption of the institutions?
I wouldn't define that exactly working well.
Ah yes, the wonderful world of libertarian thought. Where sweatshops to make cheap shit for rich countries is a win-win.
As someone who wholeheartedly disagrees with libertarian economic policies, I still find your facetious comment worthless.
Hell, even Paul Krugman doesn't label the issue as black and white. I want to remove sweat shop conditions as much as anyone, but keeping people alive through poverty takes priority.
Also, you don't fix sweat shop conditions by closing sweat shops. You just move them into the underground, where instead of shady business owners as bosses, they have shady crime bosses as bosses. The real trick, is to better sweat shop conditions.
This can even be done at Samsung/Apple's level, where they can make part of the requirement set for a contract certain workplace conditions/pay.
Purely anecdotal, but a buddy of mine lives in Shenzhen and tells me that Apple's leading the pack in terms of sweatshop conditions. Whether that's completely true, who knows.
Leading the pack in which direction? Improving sweatshop conditions or the factories they use have the worst sweatshop conditions?
which do you honestly think it is?
Hundreds of millions of Chinese have been lifted out of poverty because of their manufacturing boom. I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the fact that you're still clinging to the outdated economic beliefs that used to keep the Chinese people poor and starving.
It's a broken world where the solution to poverty is the exploitation of a generation.
You should take a look at the US from about 1880-1950... It's the case of every empire where things are built on the backs of the poor. Or in the case of earlier US, and many other societies, slaves.
That's simply how the world works. Sometimes it's a matter of greed, sometimes it isn't. The success of Walmart and Amazon seem to indicate that people will lean towards lower priced goods, period. Unless you don't buy any mass produced goods, and only source your needs to local crafts(|wo)men? Do you buy your clothes from a local tailor? How about your furniture from a domestic manufacturer?
Well, we better keep them in poverty while we work on making the world perfect. You can be the one to tell them that they world isn't perfect yet, so you're going to keep them in poverty until it's ready.
Who said the world is not broken? If it were not broken, why would we spend so much time trying to fix it?
People work in sweat shops because it is better than not working in a sweat shop. It is the bottom rung on a long ladder, albeit one that starts underwater in the sewer.
Yes, it is.
Do you have any proposal of a solution that does not make it more broken?
It's not broken--advances in civilization have always tended to involve sacrifice, be it through war, farming, or manufacturing.
Sorry, but things are going well within normal.
To those who have replied: None of you have disagreed with my statement. It is a broken world. A generation is being exploited.
I made no further comment.
But it's obvious the world is already broken. It's not a stretch to infer by your post that you are implicitly passing some sort of judgement on the state of manufacturing jobs in these countries, and that is what folks are responding to.
Have you ever been to the Chinese countryside?
I have.
Look at how far China has progressed.
It has nothing to do with Libertarianism, and everything to do with Economics...
Surely it must be possible to have economic development in poor countries without sweatshop-level exploitation.
For sure it might be possible, but historically it hasn't happened. Furthermore, there are still, to this day, occupations in the West which have deplorable working conditions. For instance, construction, mining and oil field work - where workers are outside in conditions as cold as -40 degrees, and work 12-16 hour days for 2-3 weeks strait without days off...
The fact that something happened due to economics doesn't mean there aren't other ways it could happen.
Probably not, all of the developed countries went through a sweatshop phase at some point in their past.
That's true, but just because something happened a certain way in the past, doesn't mean it's absolutely necessary it proceed that way in the future.
As an industry, the technology sector prides itself on innovative thinking and using new approaches to solve old problems in a better way. It doesn't seem like economic development should be a path-dependent process.
It saddens me to see people shrugging off human misery as though it's required by some ironclad law of economics. Instead, we should devote serious effort to figuring out how to get from "poor, subsistence farming" to "developed economy" without the "child labor and sweatshops" step.
Rawanda is already trying to make that leap: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/04/paul-kagame-e...
Care to name an example from the last 100 years?
Elsewhere I gave the example of Rwanda attempting to do this: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/04/paul-kagame-e...
>Hell, even Paul Krugman doesn't label the issue as black and white.
As if Paul Krugman is the pinnacle of radical thought on the issue?
He is a Keynesian -- which I guess counts for something like "far left" in the US.
Not only that, but he's been consistently pro globalization for his entire public career - even his work that lead to a nobel prize was along this issue.
Exactly. And at this point, his columns basically act as a fig leaf for Democrats to continue to support global "free" trade.
In a conversation-oriented forum like this, the context of a remark is important. It was in response to a claim that this was some sort of libertarian fantasy, not radical thinking overall. I think it's pretty safe to say Krugman is not a radical libertarian (hence the "even Paul Krugman").
> He is a Keynesian
As is pretty much every economist. Neoclassical economics (which borrows many of Keynes' ideas) dominates modern economic thought. 'Austrians' seem to exist only on the internet...
I'm from Europe. We have much more wild flavors.
Sure, it would be preferable to jump straight from poor farmers to a picket fence and a swimming pool without the in between, do you have a suggested way to do that?
Rawanda is trying to do something like that: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-11/04/paul-kagame-e...
They're attempting to bypass the heavy-industry stage of development, and go straight to being a knowledge/service economy. The jury is still very much out on that effort, but it's certainly worth a shot.
The Philippines would also be a great place for manufacturers to look at.
The Philippines is already a place the Chinese Navy is looking at ...
There was a wonderful Greenpeace poster from back in the 80s which had these words:
"When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we can't eat money."
It wasn't about workers' rights, but something along those lines seems to fit.
I always liked that quote, though the Greenpeace association is new to me. It supposedly originated as a native american proverb:
If you read that link, it's not so much a native american proverb as it is a quote from a specific person who's a native american. I know the fact that actual attribution of this quote, and other things said by Native Americans, gets ignored and their quotes attributed to some kind of vague native wisdom actually seems to piss a lot of people off.
The attribution of things to 'ancient Native American proverbs' is reminiscent of the whole 'noble savage' trope.
It is greedy, but it tends to have good side effects in this case all the same.
When you have a country that starts to industrialize factory owners only have to offer wages twice what someone gets on the farm to get people to migrate from the communities they grew up in to the cities. As the factory owners profit from the cheap labor they spend some of the money on themselves, but also spend some of the money on building new factories and absorbing new labor. Eventually all the excess labor in the countryside is absorbed, and the factory owners have to start competing for new labor by raising wages. This is the same general pattern that happened in Britain then Japan then Korea and China, and seems to be just starting in Vietnam now. There are sometimes variations, such as the fact that rural wages were pretty high in the US due to lots of available land, or the Chinese residency permits system that artificially restricts who can move to the city and so started the rise in wages more quickly than would be "natural" at the expense of the people forced to live in the countryside. But then again the Party knows that its dissent among the people in easy marching distance of it's offices that it really has to worry about.
But getting back on track, even if the companies weren't greedy then creating new factories in Vietnam to create jobs for Vietnamese people jobs would be the altruistic thing to do. The difference would be that instead of dividends they would turn their profits into more investment so as to make development happen faster.
I wonder what happens when they run out of countries to move to.
Wars and a nanny-state.
Probably before that hits, automation for most of the product. Eventually we will need very few people to produce any part of the product. We will automate resource extraction. Automate resource delivery. Automate resource refinement. Etc.
So this leaves us with a large population that has little point in the current economic system. So we'll get higher unemployment globally. Historically this has lead to wars, either internal or external. Marx/Hegel are right. The haves and the have-nots will duke it out. The have-nots will, like Norther American generals in the civil war, throw bodies at the haves. Eventually coming to a new equilibrium of far fewer have-nots (many are dead) and probably fewer haves. Eventually everything is owned commonly and a new society is birthed based on the idea of self actualization through experimentation.
Another option : the haves will offer a tiny share of the economy(which with optimized technology might suffice for a basic standard of living) and zero influence to the have nots and drown them with escapism ,all controlled from above by a strong totalitarian state.
Sound familiar ? if it works so far, why won't it work further on ?
I don't think escapism actually escapes anything. The US welfare state is escapism from a certain view point. However, the people in it are pretty much locked in place by the system. They are also locked out of "good places". I conjecture this is what causes the crime rate among that same population. They see little opportunity to improve their lot by any means other than violence.
There's some research[1] showing that video game escapism reduce crime. Other research show that porn reduces sexual crimes.
Add to that the free use of marijuana (which generally decreases motivation ) , the better capabilities of police enforcing crimes, the possible growing acceptance of unemployment in an automated society, you'll see even further reductions.
[1]http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111191-Less-Crime-...
hard to fight automated soldiers with intelligence tracking of your movements since birth from low earth orbit
except they can't track when it's cloudy, and because of pollution that is always. Also the automated soldiers are very expensive, and prone to crash when there's an update to the time zone libraries, or when reading street signs in foreign languages (utf-8 is never properly implemented, not even in the future)
"Historically this has lead to wars, either internal or external."
War is always a safe prediction, but do you have a specific historical precedent for large-scale, long-term, structural unemployment? I cannot think of one.
(Subsistence agriculture is not unemployment.)
French revolution within Paris and other large cities at the time. We also see riots (small war-like-things) throughout Europe during the mid-financial crisis. Riots around the US that were largely race based during the 60s and 70s. Race == poor at this time. Eventually the nanny state woke up and tried to take care of them better as a result.
As far as outward wars: WWII. Massive economic for German. War helped create jobs.
Edited to add German example.
By then the economy will be bad enough in some of the first countries they abandoned. 20 more years of decay in Detroit and it will be another viable 3rd-world manfacturing hellhole.
Africa is the next eldorado for manufacturing. It has already started.
Many parts of Africa are not politically stable enough to support this manufacturing. You should watch this Planet Money article to understand why Manufacturing (of T-Shirts in this case) move from one country to the next.
Probably true. I wonder why nobody ever counts Africa in these discussions. It's always "but what about when all the poor Asian workers start to earn higher wages and there are no more cheap countries left?".
As @smoorman1024 stated, too much political instability in much of Africa. It's true that some countries are stable, but (e.g.) being next to an unstable country doesn't affect the risk in a positive direction.
Apparently things are changing. Compare Asia from 1975 and today. It doesn't take long for such a profund change. If I was an investor, I would think that now is the right time to start looking at this continent. Chiniese already do. Many africans are highly educated but lack opportunities to put this competence in application. This continent is full of unexploited opportunities.
I think (s)he's asking what happens after Africa.
Elon Musk starts to make a LOT of money! :-)
Wages go up.
Hahaha! Very funny.
Perhaps we'll move away from consuming things that need to be manufactured and towards digital goods instead.
Robots.
This is of course the actual answer, as much as people don't want to face it.
Once all the prospects for very cheap human labor are exhausted, the work goes to robots.
It doesn't go to higher paid humans. That future will not happen.
They move to another country because the people in the first company become rich enough to demand more money. Sounds like a win. :b The real problem is if they stay in the same place forever because that place is poor forever.
How often do you purposefully buy a more expensive product solely because it's better for the people making it?
That's not a fair question. A fair question is "how often do you purposefully buy a more expensive product when the marginal expense product exceeds the marginal benefit you derive?".
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
That's not correct, because the person I'm replying to is saying that Samsung is greedy for not taking a hit in order to benefit other people.
>>>Seems a little greedy.
Which actually benefits us as the consumer. Would you prefer a less greedy corporation that goes where the most expensive labor is which then increases the cost of production which then increases the cost of the products you buy from said company?
Greed is what keeps prices low, and competition high.
> Would you prefer a less greedy corporation that goes where the most expensive labor is which then increases the cost of production which then increases the cost of the products you buy from said company?
Well, yes actually, if the higher cost of those products buys me something that I believe to be worthwhile. There's a whole bunch of stuff I am willing to pay more for, higher quality, better customer service, local ownership or representation, good labor practices, environmental concern, and on and on. I hate this idea that somehow price is the only thing that companies can compete on.
It should only require a small shift in the thinking of armchair economists that companies compete on value, of which price is one aspect of varying importance. The continued existence of branded/premium commodity items and luxury goods is sufficient proof of that.
> Which actually benefits us as the consumer. Would you prefer a less greedy corporation that goes where the most expensive labor is which then increases the cost of production which then increases the cost of the products you buy from said company?
Yes? I would definitely prefer an America where there is less disposable crap, but more secure and stable domestic jobs for people, and I think most Americans would agree.
> Greed is what keeps prices low, and competition high.
I'd replace "prices low" with "value per dollar high" or "efficiency high". Most of the replies to your comment complain about cheap products or claim higher prices are better if they come with particular outcomes. To be fair, they have a point.
However, the average commenter here doesn't have to choose between buying new work clothes and eating meat this month, so you have a point as well. So I'd generalize the sentiment to value per dollar or something similar.
When a company lowers costs, it doesn't cut prices, it increases profits. Luckily cell phones still have some competition, but the TV/Monitor market is price colluded to hell.
Higher wages and better benefits benefit the consumer.
> the TV/Monitor market is price colluded to hell.
How do you figure? TVs are cheaper and bigger than ever - they're practically giving them away.
My understanding was that producers are pumping gimmicks like 3d and huge curved screens because there are absolutely no margins left in the commodity TV/monitor market.
Well there was that whole thing where the biggest companies in the industry plead guilty to a massive price fixing conspiracy over many years and paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines…
Nah, I'm sure ten square feet of delicate electronics crammed with millions of transistors costs pennies to manufacture....
This seems to be a post implying that price fixing in the electronics industry is unthinkable because electronics are complex to manufacture.
The actual history of the industry would indicate that price fixing is common: the LCD[1], RAM[2], optical drives[3][4], GPU[5] and CPU[6] markets have all faced massive scandals involving price fixing or other anti competitive collusion, often resulting in huge fines.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aP1P0...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing
[3] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9243591/HP_sues_seven...
[4] http://www.pcworld.com/article/240937/hitachilg_data_storage...
[5] http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/28/nvidia-details-settlement...
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/business/global/14compete....
I'm really just trying to imply that price fixing in the TV industry seems unlikely because TVs are unbelievably cheap compared to what I know (admittedly, little) of the cost to manufacture them.
Price fixing in electronics seems entirely possible, and I don't doubt that it happens. But if it was happening in the world of TVs, surely TVs would cost more than they do now.
If they assured me that the extra price goes to ensure a better standard of living and better working conditions for their third-world workers, then yes.
How nice that you can afford to pay extra to ease liberal guilt. Do you think that the poorest in your country can afford to pay extra too?
For the relatively monied -- and software developers usually count among that number -- it's easy to argue that companies are too greedy, and that companies shouldn't use exploitative labour. For the lower class, paying extra so that someone in the third world can enjoy a better quality of life isn't an option.
So you say that multinational corporations shouldn't compete on ethics? I thought you neoliberals didn't chastise anyone with respect to their choices in commerce.
Yes, this is systemic. Are you trying to convince me that the situation isn't fucked? For all the claptrap about how the economy isn't a zero-sum game and that the tide lifts all the boats and so many other platitudes, there's no denying that the quality of life of most people in the world is nothing but a point in a gradient of declining living conditions, everyone benefiting from the labor of people with fewer options who have to work and live worse than them.
Anyhow, how much do you think it would raise the cost of the things you use, just to ensure safe working conditions at factories? For jeans, it's a paltry 90 cents.
http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/07/10/bangladesh-factory-saf...
Yes, the poorest in my country would probably have to think twice before spending even 90 cents, hell tell that to the homeless. The vast majority of the poor here probably wouldn't mind, given that it's a mere drop in the sea of debt they are drowning in, and that's a problem with many facets, on its own.
But there's quite a lot of room for diminishing the unfairness of this scheme, even if the solution feels even cosmetic at times given the broader problem of exploitation and inequality.
no denying that the quality of life of most people in the world is nothing but a point in a gradient of declining living conditions
I won't deny it, but I find it hard to believe. In any case, the poorest are better off, even if the middle class is declining (700M out of extreme poverty in just 20 years).
It's funny this comes up in an article about Samsung Electronics. They're not exactly in the business of selling essential goods. They basically try to convince you that each year you should get the N+1 TV or smartphone which has more or less the same capabilities as the one before. If you're buying the last Galaxy S4, paying a little more IS an option.
Donate the difference.
There are a lot of people who do just that, when possible, me included. I always prefer products made in the U.S., but when it comes to tech your choices are reduced greatly. I'm okay with paying a little more if it's more ethical.
I thought greed is what doomed us according to history is it not? US economic crisis is one glaring example. Wasteland is next. Obesity comes into mind as well which means health budget goes to the moon that force higher tax.
In the end, greed will bite you back.
Manufacturing from the US is moving to Mexico. The transportation costs are far less. Also, since they have the raw goods inside Mexico, international fluctuations of the US dollar will not influence costs as much.
I don't think Vietnam can compete with China until China stops treating its workers as slaves.
I just watched the grapes of wrath last night for the first time. Amazing movie. It was released in 1940, just a year after the book.
I guess some things will never change, unfortunately.
I hope someone gives these poor workers the decent wages and decent lives they deserve, and soon.
> I guess some things will never change, unfortunately.
I feel this way too sometimes, but if you step back you realize things change all the time. In America people banded together into worker's unions which fought tooth and nail to be treated fairly. Unions in America clearly have some shortcomings, but it did manage to move the needle from Grapes of Wrath style living to a more equitable and humane existence for workers.
Clearly these workers (and elsewhere in Asia) are starting to organize. Perhaps they too can enjoy a larger portion of the fruits of their labour.
Of course, the downside of constant change is things can get worse too and it's often very difficult to know which direction makes things better and which direction will makes things worse. Indeed, most won't even agree on what is better and what is worse.
Not really, those companies they won't move out as quickly as expected, they know what's gonna happen soon, China will need them again as soon as some real estate bubbles burst.
Hope this doesn't push the release date forward.
(edit: Irony, people. Irony.)
Still not a very funny response to the recent death of eight people.
Except that nobody died.
http://phunukieuviet.vn/phap-luat/cong-nhan-dung-do-voi-bao-... says they did, as did the original submission title. But yes, it now seems like the reports of their deaths may have been exaggerated.
Without clues such as facial expression, tone of voice and knowing who is it that you are talking to irony is indistinguishable from a normal statement. You could try to exaggerate to the point that it would be ridiculous for a sane person to assume you are serious, but it's not reliable.
Avoid Irony/Sarcasm on the internet.
Yeah, I think I need to use an explicit "/s" tag.
No one can read how hilarious I am in real life when it's in the generic font.
Avoid what now?
Leave internet irony and sarcasm alone!
We are not robots until proven otherwise by facial expressions and other physical properties.
Wait, is your post sarcasm? I know the one before the one before was, but I thought that was obvious.
Meanwhile, men attack scooters.