Joined: Oct 13, 2004 Posts: 191 Location: Mahachai City
Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 10:44 am Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
GASMON
You don't want to know what the conditions of that thai processed seafood goes though. I live in the city where most of this is done and its not a picture of pristine clean environment.
In Mahachai city you can see thick black clouds of smoke poor out of some local factories and the industrial area has a rather poor odour all the time. either from seafood or chemicals. There are over 2000 manufacturing and seafood factories in Mahachai city.
I live very close to this city and often go down there for business and I see this crap 1st hand on a regular basis. In fact my condo is actually under the same city council area as mahachai city.
Most of the work is done in either indoor or outdoor non airconditioned processing centres where its washed down with local town water as part of the cleaning process. The Seafood is stored in icy water not in fridges as in the west. The work areas are often just dirty steel tables or concrete platforms where large numbers of low paid staff work for 12 hours a day. Most of the staff have low personal hygiene. I.e don't wash there hands after using the bathroom etc.
The seafood and the processed seafood is often transported in ice or just in large water proof bins that are rarely clean with anything more than town water! The only time the seafood gets frozen is after final processing and packaging for export.
The staff only get paid 200 baht a day for thai local and 120 baht a day for Burmese. They don't get treated well by the factory owners and work 12 hours a day 7 days a week. if they are with a good company.
Some cases of staff being forced to work without pay does occur in both processing centres and on the fishing fleets that operate out of mahachai port.
If you stand around in the central park in Mahachai city. People from the factories and the fishing boat operators are there to con poor locals and illegal Burmese into working on the boats or in the factories. They have been know to kill workers who try to escape from them after joining up.
Next time you pick up a packet of imported seafood i.e. shrimp, crab squid and some fish. Its highly likely to have come from the seafood plants of Mahachai city Thailand. This also apply to food that states "Made in USA with local and imported ingredients".
Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 4:29 pm Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
gwmss15 wrote:
In Mahachai city you can see thick black clouds of smoke poor out of some local factories and the industrial area has a rather poor odour all the time. either from seafood or chemicals. There are over 2000 manufacturing and seafood factories in Mahachai city.
It sounds like Victorian Britain, as described by Dickens!
Quote:
Most of the work is done in either indoor or outdoor non airconditioned processing centres where its washed down with local town water as part of the cleaning process. The Seafood is stored in icy water not in fridges as in the west. The work areas are often just dirty steel tables or concrete platforms where large numbers of low paid staff work for 12 hours a day. Most of the staff have low personal hygiene. i.e don't wash there hands after using the bathroom etc.
The seafood and the processed seafood is often transported in ice or just in large water proof bins that are rarely clean with anything more than town water! The only time the seafood gets frozen is after final processing and packaging for export.
So, the "rich west" imposes a strict minimum wage, health and safety regulations, hygiene rules, unions etc .... which means the price of everything goes zooming up .... result? Most of what we eat and use then has to be manufactured and processed in the developing world where Victorian/nineteenth century conditions seem to rule.
Joined: Dec 07, 2005 Posts: 1828 Location: Australia
Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 6:38 pm Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
Quote:
Yes, when American flags and "support the troops" magnets are made in China, the game's over.
There is of course a solution; Make them cheaper than they do in China. The workers aren't going to like that but that is what the falling dollar eventually will result in. _________________ Lets take a ride, and run with the dogs tonight
In suburbia
You cant hide, run with the dogs tonight
In suburbia
- Pet Shop Boys
Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 8:16 pm Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
Quote:
I wouldn't get too worked up over China. Their days are as numbered as anyone else's, perhaps even more so.
Remember the old saying "I don't have to be able to outrun the angry bear, I just have to outrun YOU"?
China has several trillions of foreign currency sitting around, and much of the world's modern manufacturing infrastucture. I am quite confident their total of "numbered days" is higher than the USA's, and that is all they need to have besides time to rid themselves of the competition. Once they replace the USA in the economic catbird seat of world domination and reserve currency, they don't need to compete. Game over.
I haven't been there in 6 years, but the stories engineers ad businessmen bring back tell me what I saw that even then convinced me the USA was doomed has grossly magnified. I try to train service people in electromechanical and computer control maintenance and repairs here in California as part of my work, and 9 times out of 10, no one is interested in anything except what button to press to get rid of the immediate problem. Decadence.
In China, not only the engineers and technicians, but the translator and the laborers who unloaded the trucks were asking questions (and their company owners allowed it!), good questions, insightful questions, wondering why some techinical process wasn't done a different (and often valid) way. It was incredibly exciting, and if I hadn't been under contract at the current job I had, I may well have jumped into it all.( Somewhat later, my employer broke the contract and screwed me out of $100k prize that came at the end, and then I was really regretful!)
Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 10:51 pm Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
[quote="Fiddlerdave"]
Quote:
China has several trillions of foreign currency sitting around, and much of the world's modern manufacturing infrastucture. ...
.( Somewhat later, my employer broke the contract and screwed me out of $100k prize that came at the end, and then I was really regretful!)
Maybe, if the U.S. wanted to show who is really boss, it could just renounce the debts held by the Chinese, as a punishment for human rights violations (at least that could be the out). It would really be a desperation measure, as that action would effectively scuttle future U.S. debt market actions outside tis own borders. It would be along the lines of a national Chapter 11. But, wow, what a zinger it wold be to the Chinese, being left with would amount to a $2 trillion pile of toilet paper.
Joined: Jun 26, 2007 Posts: 1094 Location: The Canada of America
Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 6:09 am Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
Denny wrote:
Maybe, if the U.S. wanted to show who is really boss, it could just renounce the debts held by the Chinese, as a punishment for human rights violations (at least that could be the out). It would really be a desperation measure
Yeah, suicide, too, because not only would no one ever lend the United States another farthing, but everyone who held US-denominated assets would be dumping them like smallpox blankets on anyone they could find dumb enough to accept them. The economy of the United States would implode in weeks.
Denny wrote:
But, wow, what a zinger it wold be to the Chinese, being left with would amount to a $2 trillion pile of toilet paper.
Not to mention a largely unimpeded road to global pre-eminence. I thought we all wanted the multipolar world back, not yet another unipolar one. _________________ I can has cheezburger?
Posted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 3:13 pm Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
I was at a trade show for the food service industry recently. It turns out that many fresh fruits, vegetables and other food ingredients are imported from China. The country of origin of all the ingredients in a product does not have to be listed. That can of whatever you are eating could have ingredients from anywhere in the world.
Also, look at all your canned or frozen items. Check the label well of any brand to see where they were imported. You are in for a big surprise! Lots of things from China,esp. Mushrooms, pickles and peppers(pimento style). One Italian brand had everything from China! Egypt is a source for some inexpensive cereals.
As costs of shipping rise relative to the retail price the cost of local labour may be smaller than the shipping and will shift back - compound that with the US dollar dropping and many larger items may now be cost effective to make here again.
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 12:36 am Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
Nickel, you are absolutely correct on this one. For years we have been buying China's bullshit trinkets and they have been using the money to industrialize and build a strong economy. Now we are seeing everyone wanting to buy cars and drive so the price of oil and gas is going thru the roof. Unless we take action soon, we are done.
And how about that economic stimulus check? We stimulated everyone's economy but our own. If you bought gas, you gave money to the arabs; if you bought fruit and veggies, you gave money to central and south america, electronics or decent vehicles, you gave money to japan; and anything else you bought, you paid China.
The only way the stimulus check could have stimulated America's economy is if you bought cigarettes or prostitutes, hell some guns are still made here but those are being outsourced as well and we just sold our beer to the Belgians.
Joined: Jun 26, 2007 Posts: 1094 Location: The Canada of America
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 6:10 am Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
Canuk wrote:
As costs of shipping rise relative to the retail price the cost of local labour may be smaller than the shipping and will shift back - compound that with the US dollar dropping and many larger items may now be cost effective to make here again.
That's about the only thing I could see doing it at this point. North America's spent pretty much my entire lifetime putting its manufacturing infrastructure on boats and sailing them off to underdeveloped foreign climes so the boats would come back heaped with cheap goodies. We lost the jobs, the facilities, and the experience, and others have been building on them for a generation now. It was a huge self-lobotomization and at this point, I don't think we can fully recover from it. We gave away the edge just so the middle class could be demoralized, our unions gutted, and a handful of plutocrats sitting on the chest of our economy could get fatter and squeeze our nuts harder every day. We got taken in by our own people. If things balance out with China et al., remember that that means we're going to be competing with them on the basis of the wage norms set by them, not our own expectations. There's really no way to win this. _________________ I can has cheezburger?
Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2008 8:56 pm Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
Nickel wrote:
That's about the only thing I could see doing it at this point. North America's spent pretty much my entire lifetime putting its manufacturing infrastructure on boats and sailing them off to underdeveloped foreign climes so the boats would come back heaped with cheap goodies. We lost the jobs, the facilities, and the experience, and others have been building on them for a generation now. It was a huge self-lobotomization and at this point, I don't think we can fully recover from it. We gave away the edge just so the middle class could be demoralized, our unions gutted, and a handful of plutocrats sitting on the chest of our economy could get fatter and squeeze our nuts harder every day. We got taken in by our own people. If things balance out with China et al., remember that that means we're going to be competing with them on the basis of the wage norms set by them, not our own expectations. There's really no way to win this.
It was subsidized by "free" energy - the labour cost of many items produced is as low as 10-20% it was a way of reducing this to next to zero and using energy to facilitate this (and using your tax dollars by providing the infrastructure). As energy costs rise higher than the labour costs (in Canada or US) the manufacturing will return and the higher wages will be absorbed since it will still be cheaper than shipping. Small branch plants, small warehouses, longer lead times, no JIT, smaller stores - higher costs but more jobs and likely better quality.
Joined: Jun 26, 2007 Posts: 1094 Location: The Canada of America
Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2008 8:02 am Post subject: Re: We have become the bitch of China.
Canuk wrote:
As energy costs rise higher than the labour costs (in Canada or US) the manufacturing will return and the higher wages will be absorbed since it will still be cheaper than shipping.
I'm not convinced, though, that energy costs will every outstrip labour costs in the Western world. On this continent, we've put a lot of our energy eggs in the stupid basket of 18-wheelers. But rail and especially water transport are much, much more efficient, and there are all kinds of railroads to the Pacific Ocean where ships go back and forth between here and Asia. The major cost of nearly any product (at least in the West) is the labour cost; that's why the jobs were outsourced in the first place. I think if energy costs rose so high that China's cheap labour was priced out of range, just moving things around North America itself would probably be unfeasible. _________________ I can has cheezburger?
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I'll stick to my e coli-laced spinach and tomatoes, thanks.
