Foxconn Building Factories In Indonesia 75
jfruh writes "Chinese electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn is building factories in Indonesia, and upon hearing the news you might be tempted to think the company is simply moving into labor markets where it can find cheaper employees. But in fact, the Indonesian factories will specifically produce smartphones and computers for Indonesians; the country has almost as many people as the United States, but smartphone penetration there remains low."
Re:Good for them (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes good for them. But eventually, as Chinese wages increase, more work WILL be moved to Indonesia - I don't buy the bullshit that they just built the factory for the Indonesian market only. You will see them start to build phones and computes for other markets and the factory will be used as leverage to suppress wages in China. That's how it happened here in the US.
It's great that more and more of the World is advancing and it will lead us the road to an advanced planet. Wonderful.
But it's going to cause a lot of more pain in the Western World and in the US.
In general, our wages and standard of living of declined in the last couple of decades - even the educated (like software developers) are feeling the pain. And we are going to have to make adjustments.
Sure we can get a computer and cell phone relatively cheap but, medical care, college costs, food, and even energy (gasoline/oil is still creeping up even this oil boom in the States) are continuing their ever increase march upward. Industries that need the Middle Class worker are needing less and less people because of efficiencies and automation and what people they do need, they're off-shoring.
New industries need hardly any people compared to the old days. Google has only 30,000 thousand employees whereas in the old days, a company that size would have needed 300,000 or more. Now consider that all the other big companies these days are doing the same: employee wise, IBM is a shadow of its former self. And there are not enough small companies and start-ups to take up the slack.
And I'm seeing more and more displaced middle-aged workers using their retirement savings to start small businesses to create their own job and many are failing. 4 out of 5 businesses fail.
The Middle Class is disappearing and we need to start to make changes - disrupt the status quo - or we'll lose everything.
There are billions of more people in the World who in poverty and business will be able to find cheaper labor in other countries for quite a few more decades.
Solution for the US? 1950s income tax rates and strengthen the unions: try to bring back the institutions and policies we had during our boom times.
Re:Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution for the US? 1950s income tax rates and strengthen the unions: try to bring back the institutions and policies we had during our boom times.
In today's political climate, suggesting such things without mentioning their lineage would get you called a "socialist" (by people who say that's bad even though they have no idea what it means), with a possible implication of being a communist.
By that logic, McCarthy missed the big fish. He talked about communists in the state department, but missed that the White House itself was occupied by a communist - Comrade Eisenhower. Talk about us being a bunch of communist dupes! The fellow who we considered an icon of moderation and middle class values was himself a commie.