Posted on 05/15/2019 4:19:21 AM PDT by Kaslin
The workers who assemble Apple iPhones make a starting wage of $3.15 per hour in the People's Republic of China, according to The New York Times.
"Apple has said the starting pay for workers at the world's biggest iPhone factory, in Zhengzhou, China, is about $3.15 an hour," The Times reported in a story published two weeks ago.
That $3.15 per hour is less than half the U.S. minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
That means a teenager working part-time serving Big Macs at a McDonald's in the American Midwest earns a far bigger hourly wage than a Chinese adult hired full-time to build iPhones in the People's Republic.
A 2018 Congressional Research Service report on the U.S.-China trade relationship summarized Apple's supply chain and its production of the iPhone.
"According to Apple Corporation, it used over 200 corporate suppliers with nearly 900 facilities located around the world," said CRS. "The top five largest country sources of these facilities in 2017 were China (358), Japan (137), the United States (64), Taiwan (55) and South Korea (34)."
"Apple iPhones are mainly assembled in China by Taiwanese companies (Foxconn and Pegatron) using a number of intermediate goods imported from abroad (or in many cases, intermediates made by foreign firms in China)," said CRS.
In 2016, The New York Times published an in-depth story about the Foxconn facility that assembles iPhones in Zhengzhou.
"Running at full tilt, the factory here, owned and operated by Apple's manufacturing partner Foxconn, can produce 500,000 iPhones a day," reported The Times. "Locals now refer to Zhengzhou as 'iPhone City.'"
"The local government has proved instrumental, doling out more than $1.5 billion to Foxconn to build large sections of the factory and nearby employee housing," said The Times.
"It helps cover continuing energy and transportation costs for the operation," said The Times. "It recruits workers for the assembly line. It pays bonuses to the factory for meeting export targets. All of it in support of iPhone production."
Is this free enterprise?
Is the Apple iPhone an American product?
Apple's relationship with the United States of America and American workers helps illuminate some trends in the modern American economy.
The United States normalized relations with the People's Republic of China in 1979 and gave it most-favored-nation status the next year, according to CRS. In 1985, the first year for which the Census Bureau has published U.S.-China trade data online, the U.S. ran a $6,000,000 merchandise trade deficit with China. That equaled approximately $13,791,382 in December 2018 dollars (adjusted using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator).
In 2018, according to the Census Bureau, the U.S. ran a $419,162,000,000 merchandise trade deficit with China.
That means that in inflation-adjusted dollars, our merchandise trade deficit with China was 30,393 times bigger last year than it was 33 years before then.
Who is winning this competition?
In January 1980, the year we extended most-favored-nation status to the People's Republic of China, there were 19,282,000 Americans employed in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This January, there were only 12,826,000. As our population and economy grew, we lost 6,456,000 manufacturing jobs.
At the same time America was losing manufacturing jobs, Americans who did not attend college were losing income.
In 1980, according to the Census Bureau Table H-14, American households where the householder was 25 and older and had finished four years of high school but not attended college had a median income of $55,777 in constant 2017 dollars.
In 2017, according to Table H-13, households where the householder was 25 and older and had graduated from high school but not attended college had a median income of $44,970 in constant 2017 dollars.
From 1980 to 2017, the real median income of households headed by Americans who completed high school but did not attend college dropped by $10,807 -- or about 19.4 percent.
Those American householders now have little hope of getting a job assembling an iPhone -- unless they can somehow get a Chinese work visa and move to Zhengzhou.
And even if they were to do so, as The New York Times reported, they would join a workforce whose wages start at $3.15 per hour.
The U.S. Constitution united the American people in a vast free-trade zone that was coterminous with our international borders. It gave Congress the power to impose duties on foreign imports.
It did not envision creating a free-trade zone between this free republic and a People's Republic.
Now you’re just making stuff up. You really can’t know for certain where they are assembled.
You make up specious claims about China’s economy, now you make up specious claims about where South Korea makes some unnamed maker’s phones. Right, sure.
FoxConn assembles Consumer Electronics for over 500 brands from around the world. Here are just the 72 primary Contractees. Notice the ones from South Korea:
LG, Pantech, and Samsung are the three South Korean companies that manufacture cellular phones and they all contract with Taiwanese company FoxConn to assemble their phones. Too bad, so sad, you lose.
“Now you’re just making stuff up. You really can’t know for certain where they are assembled.”
My current phones say “Made in Korea” right on the case. I’ll take that over any China phone
“Too bad, so sad, you lose”
No. WE ALL LOSE if we allow human rights abusers a 100% share of the market
And then there’s the stupidity of manufacturing in a country that can kill your access to their market at any time.
You still don’t grasp what you claim is mostly false, do you? I’ve shot you down on almost all of your erroneous assertions. This is just one more. For example that 100% assertion is false, Apple iPhones are made in China, Brazil, Vietnam, and India, Apple computers are made in China, Ireland, Texas, and California, components for all of the above, except the computer’s made in Texas, are made in 36 nations including the US. The Mac Pro is entirely manufactured in Austin, Texas.
Apple’s presence in China has had a measurable improvement in working conditions and pay rates for Chinese workers due to the constant pressure their contracts and the strict enforcement puts on their suppliers to abide by those provisions. Apple has its own paid employees in each plant monitoring compliance with those workers’ rights and Apple has actually pulled a multi-billion dollar contract from a supplier who did not comply.
I’m not talking only about Apple. Stop shilling. I’m talking about ANY product made in ANY communist dictatorship. And SOME Apple products definitely are.
We should not have given the commies one single damn DIME until freedom and God-given human rights were fully 100% restored to the People.
Until then, they are an ENEMY! It absolutely disgusts me on FREErepublic to see people making excuses for trading with these lowlife scumsuckers in the name of easy profits!
The way to defeat them is to do business with them. That’s why the iron curtain fell. . . and the bamboo curtain will fall, and is falling, the same way. You just refuse to see the progress being made before your eyes.
Unfortunately we did business with the current Russian dictatorship and they became a threat to worldwide freedom once again because of it. Going as far as rolling tanks into Ukraine and displacing my own family.
Doing business with China has done nothing for us besides short term corporate profits. At the expense of helping a dictatorship grow their military, make themselves nuclear and create a global threat to human freedom. A threat we must spend more resources on every year to counter.
You dont “do business” with murdering thieves in the hope they'll become good people when they are rich enough. No, they'll rob and murder you too as soon as they see an opportunity. To these power-hungry assholes, there ain't enough room on this planet for anyone but themselves.
Death to all dictatorships! F all their apologists!
Yes, we did. Did you not see the young people of the USSR adopting western styles, music, movies, Levis, . . . There was lots of commerce that made the Russian people demand a western like economic reform like they saw that they weren’t getting from Socialism. That brought down the iron curtain.
We did lots of trade with the USSR. . . They depended on us for wheat they could not produce because their collective farm economic models didn’t work. It was more of those five year plans where commissars produced millions of bushels of paper wheat that existed only in their glowing reports created to make themselves look good. And they most certainly exported to the west because we would not accept their fiat rubles for that wheat—rubles were not a world commodity currency and could only be used as a medium of exchange inside the Soviet Union and satellite states— and they needed to export goods to get dollars to buy it. I am an economist and know these things for a fact. Your anecdotes don’t turn magically into data.
It will be very intereting to see if Apple touts the China line.
Maybe China eil be ice tro them if they do!
1965 - Working for the US government - Naval Avionics Indpls - electronics - $2.25 and hour.
What cost $2.15 in 1965 would cost $17.32 in 2018.
Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2018 and 1965,
they would cost you $2.15 and $0.27 respectively.
I have friends with homes there.
At least I can say, we didn’t have to place nets around the top of our buildings to keep workers from committing suicide from stress, low wages, constant 16 hour shifts.
________________
No Opoids and an open border did the trick.
Meanwhile, NJ is raising minimum wage to $15.
Can you imagine the further economic disaster that is going to cause, at all levels?
So to make iPhones here, Apple would have to at least quintuple its labor costs.
The real idea is to NOT create jobs here.
“Did you not see the young people of the USSR adopting western styles, music, movies, Levis,”
Yes but it was not technically legal and only the very few could have these things through back channels. Of course after the early 80s, law enforcement was nearly non-existent so that accelerated imports and the collapse.
It was those few individuals highlighting what the West had and they did not that brought down communism. Many people had no food except meager quantities of bread/grain. Once propoganda controls were down, even the leadership itself thought communism was long dead. It was an open joke to make fun of communism because you couldn’t even buy meat or toilet paper without greasing palms.
The meager trade we did with USSR in grain and raw materials is nothing compared to the wholesale relocation of a HUGE % of our production to China. Nearly every single damn thing you pick up in the stores says “china”!
It is similar to the “humanitarian” trade that was allowed with North Korea so they had some means to feed their own people. We take their raw materials to wage wars and give them some food.
IF we had full trade with USSR and North Korea including building factories, too many of their people would think a communist dictatorship works and it would slow the collapse.
Right now in China most of the leadership thinks all is great because they are getting rich from unbalanced trade and theft from free countries. Average people see there is chance to get wealthy and don’t fight the dictatorship. Such a climate GROWS the power of their dictatorship, surveillance state and military.
I have friends that sat in Chinese jail as recently as last year for merely speaking of human rights. You apologists of dictators STFU!
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