Computers do so much for us at such a tiny price that we almost take them for granted. Less than $2,000 and you’ve got a high-powered laptop that can all but organize the white blood cells in your liver into a Busby Berkeley dance number.
There is a downside to those low prices. It is how those several hundred parts are assembled into a computer and who does the assembly. In an article online here, the U.S. National Labor Committee has identified the working conditions of a few of the companies in China that assemble keyboards for the major manufacturers. It is an eye opener.
Now we both know that China is a fiscal tiger, using their population as one massive economic lever on the rest of the world. When it comes to competing with China, you give up, as they will do anything at any price to get the business. This is why North America doesn’t have an electronics industry any more. For that matter, we don’t have a toy industry, or much of a furniture industry left either.
China can always beat us on price, as they have so many people, working at excruciatingly small wages, in a police state. This certainly does simplify labour negotiations and allows a manufacturer to offshore things at very advantageous price points, but at what cost?
Some examples: At the Dongguan Meitai Plastics and Electronics Factory in Guangdong, overtime is mandatory. You work 12 hours a day at least. Your dorm has eleven other people in a room not bigger than a North American bathroom. There is no running water.
You get docked 2.5 days’ wages for taking Sunday off, so nobody takes Sunday off, even though it is a mandatory day off in China. Bathroom breaks? Learn to hold it. Not permitted. Employees are not registered in the mandatory workplace insurance, maternity leave and Social Security programs in China. Putting your hands in your pockets? A two-hour’s wages fine. You can get the same fine for "Not lining up correctly while punching time cards, or in the cafeteria." or wearing work shoes in areas outside of the factory.
The workers sit on wooden stools for twelve hours a day pounding keys into keyboard frames. If you lift you head, you get fined. If you walk on the grass, you get fined. You get unpaid mandatory overtime to clean the factory and the dorm. Plus you get to insert 3,250 keys per hour on a line that pounds out 500 keyboards an hour for Lenovo, Dell, HP and Microsoft.
For this you are paid 41 cents an hour by the time your room and board is deducted.
In short, the keyboard I’m typing this on and the keyboard in front of your computer was most likely made in a sweatshop-cum-manufacturing prison.
The problem is that there is no alternative. Products from China are given Most-Favoured Nation status in the US, which means no duty is charged. The same deal holds true in Canada.
Even if the Dongguan Meitai Plastics and Electronics Factory doubled the wages paid and cut the production rate in half, this would only add a dollar or two to the price of the keyboard. Even if six different brokers passed this increased cost along with a hefty markup, the net change in the price of a keyboard would increase by, at most, five dollars.
We both know this will never happen of course. One of the middle brokers will ensure that the extra profit never makes it to China and to the factory workers. Why? Because we’re greedy.
Is there an alternative, fair-trade sort of keyboard? None that I’ve found and I’ve looked. Why? Because we’re greedy.
RoadDave 