I remember years ago, I had a part time job with 3Com, while in school, when they were still around in Santa Clara. I was on one of the lines which mfgd the 10/100 Enet boards. The lines had lots of automation, but not quite enough, as I heard a year or two later, they began shuttering the lines and moving them overseas.
So, as in these articles, sometimes manual labor is cheaper than automation, but we may have reached a point where wages have 'normalized' enough throughout the developing world that the variance is not significant enough to make manual labor economical.
What are the billions of people in developing nations (south Asia, Africa) going to do for a living, if their infrastructure and economies have not matured enough to sustain their own 'homegrown' industries?
I mean, outsourcing was seen as detrimental to our economy, but this phenomenon also had an impact in pulling millions of people in dev nations out from arduous agrarian and other subsistence activities.
I liked your last paragraph. I believe too that it was detrimental for the lives of those people who immigrated to cities to find jobs at those factories. Jobs that are detrimental to their health in many ways.
In some cases, yes. But I think on balance people who escape the countryside for the city factory jobs are not leaving a comfortable job for the promise of riches but with health risks. The factory/city job offers a much better alternative. An alternative to being a subsistence farmer or a day laborer, or a maid, or the daughter who has to marry at 16-18 and have no chance at an education. In the countryside it's not unusual for people to barely 'eke out' a 'living'. It could be picking up discarded trash and finding something recyclable, etc. Going from the coutryside to working for a Foxconn is like going from line cook at MickeyD's to being exempt salaried in the US with flex time -it's no contest.
As 'unhealthy' as the city job might be, the alternative in the countryside is, for many people, worse. It's a life of a kind of feudalism.
So, as in these articles, sometimes manual labor is cheaper than automation, but we may have reached a point where wages have 'normalized' enough throughout the developing world that the variance is not significant enough to make manual labor economical.
What are the billions of people in developing nations (south Asia, Africa) going to do for a living, if their infrastructure and economies have not matured enough to sustain their own 'homegrown' industries?
I mean, outsourcing was seen as detrimental to our economy, but this phenomenon also had an impact in pulling millions of people in dev nations out from arduous agrarian and other subsistence activities.