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LordVic

Cancelled
Sep 7, 2011
5,938
12,458
There are many of you on here who understand production and manufacturing better than me, but why does Apple not invest as heavily in the U.S.? General curiosity here. If the Chinese and Indians can be trained to build iPhones, why can’t the U.S.?

Profit Margins

Apple is chasing the perverbial never ending growth of profit and profit margins stability. This ends up with Apple (they're not the only company) moving manufacturing around to locales who have ridiculously low standards of living, and ridiculously low employment standards. This allows these companies to boost profit margins by reducing labour costs.

This sort of movement has happened countless times over the years of international trade. First it was korean made stuff, until they advanced and no longer was the cheapest, than taiwan, china, and now over to India.

Unregulated free trade in markets with low labour standards has been a massive disaster for humanitarian reasons. Not only are these comapnies basically using labour that is considered one step above slavery, they hurt local communities at home by refusing to employ people in their own countries.

I'm not anti-free trade. But IMHO, Free trade should only be allowed like this when we treat the people of the foreign nation the same as we do at home. But that doesn't put enough margins in corporatists pockets.
 
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