Chinese workers too expensive?

As we pointed out this week, workers in China are on the move.  The employer’s, mostly foreign ones who are more vulnerable for obvious reasons, have responded with significant pay increases. There is no turning the clock back as the Chinese working class is slowly finding its feet.  This is not good news for the bosses and they are already considering alternatives; Chinese workers are becoming too expensive.

Remember when it was Mexico and the Maquiladoras that were the greatest threat to our standard of living?  Factories closed here in the US as production was moved south of the Rio Grande in order to take advantage of  low Labor costs and to escape the meddling interference of the trade Unions.

Then Mexicans became too expensive as China became the new source of cheap Labor and capital accumulation. The Chinese government is very business friendly, had millions of workers at its disposal and no Unions to speak of that weren’t sponsored by the bureaucracy.

While executives at US corporations like AnnTaylor would profess to be supporters of democratic and Labor rights, this is merely the public face necessary to stave off opposition at home; they don’t want to be seen as sweat shop owners, which they are of course.

We all remember the term the employers’ used (and many workers took up) to describe the cause of the decline of our living standards: American workers were to blame, we had “priced ourselves out of the market”.  Then Mexican workers “priced” themselves out of the market.  Now, Chinese workers are pricing themselves out of the market they way they are headed; workers fighting for a decent life is not a popular activity with capitalists it appears.

Retailers like AnnTaylor, Guess and JC Penney are looking for more profitable locales as Chinese workers seem headed in the wrong direction. Vietnam and Bangladesh are a possibility.  2010 Labor costs for China are $1.84 an hour and India, $2.99.  But a human being’s life activity can be bought .49 cents and hour in Vietnam; this just might be too good a deal to pass up.

If the employers can’t reduce Labor costs they will have to “absorb” them, the Wall Street Journal points out.  And this is not good for profits.  “It’s a really bad time for Labor costs to be rising.“ says one market strategist.  Is it ever a bad time for workers  to increase the cost of our Labor power?  I don’t think so.

JC Penney has been moving its production to countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, countries that have a “better cost base from a Labor standpoint” says a JC Penney executive. Readers might remember the massive strikes of apparel workers in Bangladesh, mostly women.  Some workers were shot, murdered by the state in its defense of the interests of domestic factory owners and foreign retailers.

Capital will always seek the cheapest Labor power; it is as natural as the sun rising in the east.  Recognizing this simple fact should be a lesson to us.  American capitalists are our enemy and workers of all countries are our allies in the struggle against exploitation.  Nationalism, patriotism, “one nation under god” is all fake, it is the factory owners’ strategy to divide us along national lines, to separate us from our class allies that speak different languages or who live in different parts of the planet. The history of the US working class is a rich and militant one.  The history brought to us by Bank of America and the historians of capitalism is not our history; it is theirs. Chinese strikers recently appealed to their ranks not to let “capitalists” divide them.  Unity between capitalists of a nation and workers of that nation is the one of the great obstacles to victory that we have to overcome.

I was talking with a friend the other day and he was mentioning that he doesn’t like to give a name to what he thinks about the world, that he didn’t like to glorify individuals.  I don’t disagree with that but when an individual or group of individuals have a view of the world or a set of ideas that correspond with objective reality, help us understand the world in which we live and how we can change it for the better, and especially if they are vilified and persecuted by those who want to maintain the status quo, they deserve to be credited for those ideas.

So when we see capital chasing cheap Labor all over the world it is good to recall what Karl Mark wrote over 150 years ago:

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

You can find more of this at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm - 007