Why Stuff From China Is So Cheap

I didn't watch the video after reading the description. But this problem of poor worker conditions (and poor compensation) is true of so many goods produced cheaply in China or other countries in Asia. I feel we in the "West" (i.e North America, Western Europe) have an ambivalent attitude towards this issue. We decry the outsourcing of manufacturing to other countries, yet we're only too happy to continue purchasing those goods. We might say we are prepared to pay more for quality and standards, but our endless consumption of all these cheap products suggests otherwise.

What's more, we fawn over some technology companies and take such an uncritical view of their behaviour over the production of their goods (because we love their products) when we should in fact be far more critical.

On a more positive note, there are schemes like Fairtrade that have gained favour with the public. Fairtrade guarantees a fair price to producers of mostly food products. It's not perfect, but a product with a Fairtrade mark provides some re-assurance that the product you buy meets certain ethical standards. Encouragingy, Fairtrade goods are popular with the public too:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/mar/02/fairtrade-taste-...

Wow, that's quite a feat of misunderstanding. And I tried pretty hard to make sure that that exact comment wouldn't be made in order to reject the thing out of hand.

I'm fine with producing goods in the far east, but the fact is that the low prices are in fact powered by more than just a simple difference in value between currencies and standard of living.

The pollution and the work place risks (including death) are a really large factor in those price differences, as corroborated not only by this particular video (which is horrifying) as well as by contact with people that live there or have spent significant time there.

To dismiss this as propaganda is Ostrich politics at its best, we may have to simply realize that we will have to pay more for the goods that we receive unless we want to be explicitly named as accomplices in the situations that we have created.

The fact that some companies have already started programs to track the resources that go into their goods and that some companies have agreed to living wages and anti-pollution measures for their entire supply chain indicates that at least in some boardrooms the message is heard. Profits are important but not that important.

It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that accidents like this don't also happen in the U.S. (or other "first-world" countries). In the mid-to-late '90s I was working on a project that had a fatal accident in the Omaha NE area (fortunately I wasn't present to witness it).

Another contractor was lacing new fiber-optic cable to the existing coaxial cable and realized they'd run the fiber over a safety ground about 7 poles back. Rather than unlace that much cable, they opted to lift the safety ground, move it outside the fiber and reconnect the ground. These ground wires are not supposed to be carrying current when things are working correctly - this one was an it electrocuted those working on it.

Regulations are pretty explicit about how to add cable and telephone wires to a power pole ... and only the power company is supposed to mess with the power. The SCTE and NCTA both have training regimens that obsess over safety, especially when you're working around power (since none of us are actually power experts).

So why did this accident happen? The workers were contractors of contractors of contractors who got paid by the mile. The more fiber they laced up in a day, the more they got paid. They knew there was a slight risk the ground wire would be hot once disconnected but they chose to ignore it for financial reasons.

I've seen tall scaffolding on wheels being moved around in the U.S. and I'm hoping the workers were well versed in the perils of letting their metal structure touch power lines, but what you can't tell from this video is how well these workers were trained and whether they realized the wire they hit was active.

I'm not disagreeing with your article's main points ... that we need to value human life and protect the environment. But I also don't think this video is particularly good at promoting those values.

It's not the low-pay per se that concerns those who criticise the outsourcing of everything to the developing world. It is the lack of comparable safety standards, environmental standards and workers' rights. We in the developed world fought hard for around 200 years to achieve these standards and rights and it smarts to see large corporations side-step them by outsourcing to countries that don't require or enforce them.

It is in everyone's long-term interest to continue lobbying the companies who make our stuff to start requiring equal standards and rights wherever their stuff is manufactured. It will benefit the people of those countries who do the manufacture while re-balancing some of the giant manufacturing cost differential that these companies achieve by such a side-step.

Cheap stuff comes at a high cost.

> It looks like a reoccurring pattern

You want the political articles, you've got to accept the degraded quality of the site and discussion that goes along with them.