Link It will be interesting to see how the Chinese government handles this situation. With the shrinking work force workers will have more power to ask for higher wages and more benefits. This will lead to higher production costs and companies will look elsewhere for cheap labor. As we learned in the "Perhaps and explanation why the economy isn't improving under the Messiah", higher minimum wages lead to higher unemployment. Will the government let them leave or will they simply nationalise the factories?
So do Child Labor Laws and OSHA. Hell, anyone who pisses and whines about making 20 cents an hour hates capitalism.
Well, the biggest company in the news recently is Foxconn, who makes the iphones and other gadgets. They had a bunch of suicides at their factories....due to low wages. Then apparantly they were giving 30% raises to everyone....the last I heard was that they were going to cancel the raises and move the factories to Vietnam, where the workers won't complain.
This is why I think the publicity for this is weird, and correct me if I'm wrong: 12 suicides in 5 months at this Chinese factory complex of 300,000, or 9.6 per 100,000 per year. Actual Chinese national suicide rate: 13.9 per 100,000 per year. Looking at these numbers, maybe they ought to be promoting the fact that their suicide rate is lower than the national average.
One I start living off of retirement, a place where you can live comfortably on $180 a year sounds nice.
China may actually have a military large enough to pull this off. If there is a wide spread organized strike the military won't be able to do anything about it. You can only "liquidate" so many people before there is no one left to kill.
