Labor in China and America

Hard to find good help?

The truth is, China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. The reason to come to China is the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill...Our products require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill this room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields... - Tim Cook, Apple CEO

This is a freebie. It’s a reminder to all of us about the neglect–even abuse–with which we, the West, have treated our skilled workers..

A friend, a director-level employee with an engineering background, who has worked with multinational companies in various capacities while primarily based in the US, wrote me, "American manufacturing moved to China not because of dumb labor, but because you could hire high IQ people for dirt cheap. If your machine broke down, no problem; some Chinese guy (with basically a masters in EE) would pull out the circuit boards and using probes and other instrumentation determine what board needed replacing and he would work annually for a fraction of the salary of his equivalent in

Manufacturing in the US

Manufacturing here is a nightmare: at our US facility our only requirement for a assembler was a high school degree, US citizenship, passing a drug and criminal background check and then passing a simple assembly test: looking at an assembly engineering drawing and then putting the components together. The vast majority of Americans were unable to complete the assembly test, while for our facility in China they completed it in half the time and 100% of the applicants passed. An assembler position in the US would average maybe 30 interviews a day and get 29 rejections, not to mention all the HR hassles of assemblers walking off shift, excessive lateness, stealing from work, slow work speed and poor attitudes.

The product line is highly specialized equipment, so it makes no sense to fully automate it, most of the components are assembled by hand and for certain steps we use custom engineered jigs. And for those saying that the position wasn't paying enough, it paid $12 an hour starting in an area with an extremely low cost of living where property taxes for a 2000 square foot house would be $800-$1000 a year. Assemblers don’t make $150K. An assembler puts parts together. The position starts