Is that rhetorical?
And what’s to say it’s better?
And is it 1/10 the price, since they have such lower labor costs?
Did they actually spur innovation, or just plagiarize/steal the designs and work after someone else did the work?
Or is the goal to sell out jobs to make a buck and get junk cheap?
There are at least a few cliches here.
Overseas is not only China. As far as tools go, Overseas has historically been Taiwan. And their labor costs are not 1/10 of ours, neither do they need to copy anything, or do they lack skills or ingenuity. They've been making tools since the war. They made pots and pans from Chinese shells they would get in their fields by the millions. No one has given them anything for free.
A family member works in a place that has facilities both in the US and in Taiwan, I won't go into details on what the business is but in short they have so much demand that they went for factory refurbishing (very expensive) modules from decommissioned gear - modules that would otherwise be years on a waiting list. The whole process is long, meticulous, precise, but not overly impossible to master.
So my person landed in that little team that does all the refurbishing - history might have seen worse viper pits, but rarely. All ladies, all coming from a specific geographical area. The thing was plagued by intrigue, led by people who have genuinely achieved a lot in their lifes by coming illiterate from other countries and made a life for themselves, but had been promoted to their level of absolute incompetence and stuck there like spiders in a corner, ill-will everywhere, and absolute disregard for procedures, as long as numbers are covered.
Absolute old-style Communist stuff...
We made more units this month than last month. Yeah but instructions say you had to clean up this module with ethanol, and you're using methanol. Shut up, it says clean it with alcohol! Yeah, methyl alcohol, it specifically says methanol not ethano...Shut up, what are you, a know-it-all?
Well, all these shiny modules were eventually sent in Taiwan to be put into end products. What do you know, rejection rate for these modules turned out to be above 90%. This unit is now being moved to Taiwan. The little viper crew is being dissolved, and members sent in other crews all around the factory, ready to poison other streams.
Luckily by that time my guy had jumped through hoops to get out of that crew and into another one where people are actually normal.
Asians are not beating us because of lower labor rates. They are because they have that absolute unique combination of work ethics, very tightly woven with sheer, unadulterated, pure panic - from failure, from their bosses, from everything.
I often work with a remote crew outside of the US - we'd then be in a conference call. Well, you can almost hear their cavities tighten when their boss gets in the channel. It's like a children's tale, you can almost feel the cold breeze.
And during that time, the American worker is no longer a Colonel Sanders-type guy in a Carhartt bib with 50 years for knowledge and experience. It could very well be a twenty years-old who can barely read and can't tell a screwdriver from a spatula, but thinks the world owes them, or a very nice, very decent lady who crossed the Darien gap on foot with a baby on her back, ended up making a life here, but simply can not stand any questioning or challenging of her opinion or decisions, because she's still full of self doubt as she gets close to retirement.
Seen both types.
I highly recommend the "
American Factory" documentary on Netflix, about the Fuyao glass factory coming to the US, and the clash of cultures. The movie is getting old now, but is still relevant.
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