The New World Economy
If you own an iPod, XBox, or almost any electronic device, it was probably made by a Chinese worker. The article below illustrates how this is affecting the American economy. You all are facing future employment in a world where high-tech jobs don't often stay in America.
Wanna live in a dorm and work 12 hours a day, six days a week?
posted by Mr. Carlisle at 8:46 AM
9 Comments:
I should probably start leaning Chinese now.
11:30 AM
I think one of our biggest problems is the facade of higher education- saying that we all need doctorates and that all people 'have' to go to college- this socio-economic biased society makes is so then we have a tremondous wealth gap- we don't make blue-collar workers anymore; we make college graduates....
9:24 PM
I agree with you to a point. The article also states that companies like Apple need more engineers. I think a lot of students are avoiding math and science classes.
6:33 AM
Chinese students start learning programming starting in elementary school, I believe. It's not even a well known class here
9:54 AM
True Carlisle, but I also think that one of our biggest problems is that as a society, we tend to discriminate against blue collar workers in a factory, which makes people not want to enter into lower level jobs. But we definately need engineers- in an economy like this, there is surprisingly over 2 million open engineering jobs the corporations need filling, however the USA isn't producing them... so difficult to improve the economy :/
5:56 PM
I understand the basis of your point regarding blue collar workers, however, I also think it boils down to profit for corporations like Apple. For now, Chinese workers are willing to work for less than their American counterparts in conditions that most Americans would find deplorable.
The price of doing business in China is slowly rising and that coupled with high fuel costs for shipping goods across the ocean, are leading to corporations slowly increasing the amount of goods they manufacture in the U.S.
I think more people should pursue careers like plumbing/pipe fitting and electricians. Those jobs can't be outsourced.
5:59 PM
Although it may be safer, and a better life for the workers than at their old home, maybe without any income but working at FoxConn is not giving these people a true high quality of life. Spending all their days working like robots in their uniforms and having traffic controlled by guards cannot be very satisfying. I think companies should be less greedy and give up some of their large profits to give even more to their workers.
7:20 PM
What is a high quality of life? It's not the standard of living that makes for a happy life. I'm pretty sure that our forefathers were as happy as we are, and yet they had a "worse" quality of life.
The true crime is not that the people are poor and are being manipulated, because maybe they could be content with that. The crime would be the ravaging of these people's emotions. The redundancy of their work and the extreme discontent it produces is what makes this story a horror.
7:55 PM
My dad has told me multiple times that I should become super, super efficient in the math and science fields, because then I "can get any job I want." There are a lot of foreigners immigrating to this country due to the lack of efficiency in these fields. No one does show interest. I don't. There is a decreasing amount of people who use the analytical side of their brain. I don't understand why we need more of the hands-on workers, though. Since there are so many open jobs for engineers and such, I think that should be our main focus. We have plenty of Union workers. Engineers are moving this country forward.
8:44 PM
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