Rana Dasgupta on Sun, 8 Aug 2004 14:36:39 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> The Art of Sweatshops |
Coco You're right - it would be disingenuous to sideline the issue of the cheap labour. I would just add two things. First: the amazingly low costs of production in China cannot be reduced to low wages alone. The Indian newspapers are always commenting in exasperated tones about the fact that Chinese workers are 2, or 3, or 4 times more productive than Indian workers. This divergence is not about wage levels but about processes, technology, community structure, social and political controls, etc - and it helps to account for the vastly higher levels of FDI in China compared to India. Secondly: business leaders understand perfectly well that cheap labour on its own is a short-lived economic advantage. Jobs that came to India five or ten years ago are already leaving for other countries that can now undercut India. Whenever companies grow up on the strength of a simple promise to offer the cheapest labour they therefore have to struggle fast to offer some other kind of value than this before their advantage is lost to somewhere else. What you say remains true of course: China has 1.2 billion people, and stern controls on employment and movement which guarantee a huge supply of cheap labour even at this time of its hectic growth. But shifts of the size that are happening cannot happen in any protracted way simply because there is very cheap labour around. Although perhaps the nation state for the 21st century has to have *everything*. A big, prosperous, well-educated, ruthless, ambitious middle class. An almost unlimited pool of poor rural refugees with nowhere to go to except vast urban slums. And strict controls on space and movement so that social categories remain distinct and any desired combination of human types can be served up to corporate needs. Works best if you have more than a billion people. R # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net