Right, when compared to the costs of living in a communist dictatorship they are doing just great! It's exactly the same as we are! People just outsource their work there because they prefer to pay their wages to Chinese people instead of Americans.
Pepsi, were you aware that Apple was the very last computer company to outsource to China? They finally had to for competition purposes. Every other company did it first. . . And Apple was the last hold-out. One of the other reasons was it was not just the computer manufacturers that decamped to China but the parts suppliers who ALSO moved there as well, forced to go for reasons I will go into below.
Nevertheless, Apple immediately went on a campaign to improve the lot of the workers in China using the contracts they imposed. . . And pulled contracts if the contractors did not comply. Included was a prohibition against Child labor. Forced overtime. Etc. Apple required the workers on their assembly lines to be paid 30-50% more than the workers lines working on similar products, which had a resulting impetus to raise every workers wages.
And NO it’s not compared to the “costs of living in a communist dictatorship” but to economic costs of living. Just because the government is one thing, an economy still has COSTS OF LIVING. Those are inescapable. Companies outsource to the lowest cost of labor, regardless of form of government. I am educated as an economist. . . And I can tell you that businesses are switching labor to elsewhere than China because labor costs are now higher in China than elsewhere.
The reasons that companies left the US had little to do with costs of labor. The US Worker was still miles above foreign labor in productivity. It was REGULATION and PAYROLL TAXATION that killed the jobs here, forcing employers to seek the work elsewhere. Government nitpicking plant design and repurposing blocked swift movement to respond to fast moving markets and that was another big problem. I spoke to a CE maker in California who INVENTED and created a new market niche product. . . But he could NOT GET GOVERNMENT APPROVALS FOR HIS SECOND GEN PRODUCT IN UNDER A YEAR OF TRYING, which had only minimal changes from the first gen product, but which the regulators would NOT allowing him to make until he had their official approvals!
His Asian Competitors for HIS INVENTION were already selling the imported rip-offs of his 2nd gen product (design stolen from the patent office) while he was waiting for the third review of some paper work reviews just to make the minor changes in his design for his assembly line!
His ultimate choice to survive? Shut down his plant and contract his manufacturing to China, shutting down the jobs of his 200 workers. The china assembler was up and running in a month and a half! NO PAPER WORK REQUIRED! No government blocking his every move! Meanwhile, he had LOST half of his customers to his competitors while the regulators dithered.
That’s what forced the move to other labor and manufacturing markets. Labor costs were the least of it, contrary to the myths you’ve heard.