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Sodium_nitride ,

Guys. You are missing the obvious answer here. More than half of the world’s industrial robots are installed in China. Furthermore, they have been developing their internal supply chain for decades on end. Their economies of scale are very strong.

I swear, the orientalism is very strong on this post. It cannot be that a country is yielding the fruits of decades of hard work building up their industry. It has to be slave labor …

absentbird ,
@absentbird@lemm.ee avatar

It’s not like this is coming out of nowhere, there’s some pretty compelling reasons to be concerned about forced labor in the Temu supply chain.

Unpigged ,

Temu is late stage capitalism cancer.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Chinese goods are heavily subsidized because the chinese state knows humans with free time and no money are an expensive liabiliry. They see busywork in itself as useful in itself, if it brings in any foreing currency on top, that’s just gravy.

interdimensionalmeme ,

Chinese goods are heavily subsidized because the chinese state knows humans with free time and no money are an expensive liabiliry. They see busywork in itself as useful in itself, if it brings in any foreing currency on top, that’s just gravy.

Unpigged ,

Of course, Temu is a secret CCP plan to fight unemployment!

Yeah, but that’s a hard fucking no. For example, youtu.be/vFII7t9FtO8

interdimensionalmeme ,

Temu ? No, that’s the structure of the whole chinese economy

ILikeBoobies ,

Humans are cheaper to replace than machines

tazy ,
@tazy@lemmy.tazy.xyz avatar

Why ever buy from temu i’d never even install it or go to the site

bloodfart ,

i’ve worked in a few factories and this is not always true, especially with short runs.

to make a machine assemble a thousand things you gotta “tool up”. that used to mean designing and building the tool that would do the repetitive motion but nowadays its just as much laying out gcode as it is figuring out how to make the more generalized machinery perform the specific tasks required for putting together some thing.

so take a computer mouse, there’s like four parts. a usb wire, a circuit board, the bottom and the top. assembling the mouse is plugging the wire into the circuit board, aligning the board to the standoffs in either the top or bottom and make sure the wire is going out the hole then snap the top or bottom to it’s counterpart then test.

probably fifteen seconds from parts to tested and ready for packing?

so in a thousand unit run you’re looking at four and a quarter hours of human work. lets go ahead and round up to five, since someone is gonna have to set up our mouse assemblers bench, write out instructions, unpack the parts and dump them into bins, etc. it won’t be 45 minutes of work, but more slop is better!

so for a thousand unit run you could pay your mouse assembler $15/hr and still only have 7.5c unit cost of assembly.

packing is another one that often gets done by people, but a mouse is pretty much wrap, tie, bag, box. maybe another fifteen seconds of labor, so add 7.5c onto your assembly and youre looking pretty good.

now your contract factory isn’t gonna quote you what they think they can hit, they’re gonna drag their laziest, slowest worker over to do the process five times, take the average and quote that. then they can charge you for ten hours when it only took five and pocket the difference. even then 30c per unit is most likely less than the robot equivalent.

just the cost of a quote to tool up for that run is maybe $50? free quotes weren’t the norm domestically back in the day, but they were becoming more common overseas. then you’ve got the cost of the tooling (we’ll keep ip like part layouts and gcode here) and the machine time itself!

there’s also the actual injection molding of the top and bottom, making the cord, assembling the board, etc, but thats a whole nother conversation!

steventrouble , (edited )

deleted_by_author

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    renzev OP ,

    Finally, many of the items on Temu are factory rejects that would have gone to the landfill otherwise.

    Are they really? You got a source? This is pretty cool if true.

    steventrouble , (edited )

    deleted_by_author

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    altima_neo ,
    @altima_neo@lemmy.zip avatar

    I thought Alibaba was for businesses and aliexpress was their consumer site?

    TranscendentalEmpire ,

    Slavery and wage slavery is happening across the globe, but companies with thin margins don’t resort to it any more than companies with huge margins (e.g. Nike). If anything, monopolistic corporations have much more power to use and enforce slave labor than the small and medium-sized factories selling at razor thin margins on Temu.

    That’s most likely not the case. Larger corporations require more workforce stability and require better trained labour to maintain quality control. These needs are better fulfilled by factories who actually hire their labourers instead of hiring temps and auxiliary workers who make considerably less.

    Factories that are supplying corporations like temu can only maintain a profit margin if they rely on the cheaper auxiliary labour. Often times hiring and firing them for specific manufacturing quotas. This is one of the reasons temu doesn’t have any consistency in quality.

    Things sold in the US are way overpriced. Temu is actually pretty normally priced if you consider the average cost of living in the countries it ships to.

    If anything they are extremely underpriced, especially when you equate the cost of shipping. The cost of a lot of items on temu are significantly lower than the production cost. As you said it’s rare to have a markup that exceeds 50% and a lot of stuff on temu is significantly cheaper than that.

    I believe temu operates as a way to minimize the excess of surplus production. Basically in economics it’s always hard to balance the size of your labour force to meet the exact level of consumer demand.

    Demand could be growing, so we built a new factory. Great, we are now employing more workers and have the ability to supply the increased demand. And then something like COVID happens, exports stop, demand halts, and now you have a factory with no work.

    In the west, it’s tough shit, pack it up, go home. However, in China local governments can supply local businesses with loans, hoping that demand returns and they can eventually turn a profit. So they pay the factories to produce anyways, well what do they produce if there is no actual demand for export. Well anything, it doesn’t matter, it’s just about maintaining productivity levels. Just throw the shit in the warehouse and we’ll figure out what to do with it later…enter temu.

    If you buy it from somewhere else, it’s still coming from a factory in China. May as well cut out the middleman.

    But you aren’t buying from the factory, you’re buying from temu, the middle man.

    Temu, but economically their prices make sense.

    Only if you equate the use of cheap auxiliary labour, the sky rocketing debt of local Chinese governments, and the subsidization of global shipping offered by the Chinese fed.

    The problem with this version of robbing Peter to pay Paul is that there isn’t actually any profit imported into the country. The loans and subsidies offered by their government were implemented to intice an actual return, where the Fed supports the local government, who support the company, who use the profit to support the workers. When there is no profit, the system is just aquiring debt.

    wreckedcarzz ,
    @wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world avatar

    I mean, 1 and 5 are basically fancy ways of saying “we can’t stop slavery so why bother trying” which, erm, isn’t exactly great…

    Apytele ,

    Alternatively, they’re arguing that there’s better ways to try to stop slavery than depriving yourself, and simply paying more for something is inadequate. You may as well just buy the thing cheaper then focus on fighting for overall social change. The amount you pay for the object does not free those slaves, but you giving less of it to Nike’s CEO might help you conserve enough for yourself to give you better footing while fighting for those social changes

    Now, I’m also interested to see how the actual math works out as to the labor and materials costs and whether or not various companies directly or indirectly utilize slave labor, and which systems really do ultimately deliver the most worker friendly conditions. I’m not sure how I would get that info or how to know who to trust (medical journals are the academic text I’m used to parsing ). But the philosophical argument itself has a lot more to it than “fuck them slaves.”

    lightrush ,
    @lightrush@lemmy.ca avatar

    Whatever makes you sleep at night. ☺️

    Tartas1995 ,

    Temu is also shady about your data. So lol, you fucked yourself too.

    flashgnash ,

    Unless you’ve been a monk for the last 15 years your data’s already out anyway

    Even on Lemmy, everything you say is public and can be harvested pretty easily

    Tartas1995 , (edited )

    TIL, posts that I post publicly and knowingly so, are the same as app that has 2 class-action lawsuits against them related to privacy and just had an event where they bought your likeness from you for 40bucks while advertising it as a “referral program” and the owner of the app had a malware infested App uploaded to the App Stores and with people claiming that their banking account information got leaked through the app.

    Thanks! What would I do without the knowledge that you provided to me?

    There is a difference between what I like to watch on YouTube and my banking information.

    Edit: I forgot to mention that there is a law that forces Chinese companies to grant the Chinese state access to their computer systems. So everything, I said, plus a whole ass government (with more and less corrupt people) has your data!

    bufalo1973 ,
    @bufalo1973@lemmy.ml avatar

    On the edit part, I guess the same could be said about GAFAM and the US

    Tartas1995 ,

    Well, I don’t wholely disagree but the laws are different and the application of the law is different.

    But yeah, distrust is appropriate in both and all other case.

    lowleveldata ,

    Does it matter how much the mouse cost? If my calculation is correct, expensive mouse price - reasonable wage is still < expensive mouse price - 0

    sirico ,
    @sirico@feddit.uk avatar

    G203 is my budget go to, prob still uses slave labour but they’re Swiss so you’ll never know

    Nougat ,

    A relative was talking about ordering stuff from Temu. My response was that the products sold through them (they're just a marketplace) are so cheap that there's got to be slavery involved.

    renzev OP ,

    From what I hear, it’s also Chinese manufacturers trying to “break in” to the western market by initially operating at a loss. But I doubt how effective of a business strategy that would be, given that there is basically zero brand loyalty on marketplaces like temu. Am I getting my USB dongles from CKXLKY or TOPK? Fuck if I care! Idk tho, maybe the experience is different for people who buy stuff other than cheap electronics.

    But yeah, there is 100% slavery involved. It’s like the cacao/coffee/chocolate industries, down to the “don’t blame us, we’re just buying these goods at market prices, like everyone else” excuse. Brother, you are the one setting the market price.

    Nougat ,

    Am I getting my USB dongles from CKXLKY or TOPK?

    Actual laughing sounds came out of my mouth.

    CarbonIceDragon ,
    @CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social avatar

    Ironically I have had good enough experiences with one or two Chinese brands to probably look at their stuff first whenever I ultimately replace/upgrade what I’ve got from them, but they certainly aren’t the “spam random letters to game Amazon’s systems” sort of brands and are really only slightly cheaper than the equivalents from elsewhere.

    ironhydroxide ,

    It’s less a case of gaming Amazon, as it’s a case of amazons systems making it easier to game the trademark office, than gaming Amazon.

    DrWeevilJammer ,
    @DrWeevilJammer@lemmy.ml avatar

    I only buy my USB dongles from PUKEBONUR!

    azertyfun ,

    My country made it illegal to sell at a loss (for that exact reason) and IIRC wish and/or temu got in some kind of legal trouble for it. So did IKEA when they tried to use their restaurant as a loss leader - illegal here!

    Then there’s the matter of shipping subsidies from the PRC, ain’t no way cross-continent shipping is 0.02 € on a 5 € item for which the last mile is handled by the national postal service which I know for a fact charges anyone more than one euro for delivering a damn envelope.

    dubyakay ,

    Those reasons sound retarded. Having a loss leader product or line just means you are recouping it elsewhere. It’s a draw-in, like $1.25 hotdogs at Costco. It’s different than if your whole business operates at a loss for a certain time in order to squeeze out competition. The only way this would make even marginally sense is if say both IKEA and JYSK had a cafeteria and IKEA decided to sell food at a loss while JYSK would not be able to afford in that segment.

    From what I know, it’s not actually China subsidizing shipping, but the individual target countries instead, mostly on taxpayer money. This wouldn’t be bad in practice, except that goods not originating from China do not have subsidized shipping, thus the unfair advantage.

    pineapplelover ,

    No it’s like verified that they’re using child slaves to make their products

    jqubed ,
    @jqubed@lemmy.world avatar

    There are higher upfront costs with a robot, though, so if the volume is low human labor can make more sense.

    downpunxx ,

    human labor always makes more financial sense when you're not paying the human labor a living wage, which is why, for the last 30 years, everything the western world consumes is produced in china. it's the human slavery. it's in the machine.

    Melkath ,

    You can pay one person 5k for 40 years, or you can use a machine that cost 200k upfront that breaks down in 10 years.

    Which one are the capitalists going to choose?

    ililiililiililiilili ,

    Years? 😂 Capitalists just know the slave driver needs $1250 a quarter (to keep the pallets flowing).

    FireRetardant ,

    America was founded on slavery and that established a certain quaility and way of life. When slavery was abolished many people wanted to keep the lifestyle that was built on the backs of slaves but without relying on slaves (cheap sugar and foriegn produce for example). Eventually corporations figured out that most people won’t care so long as the slavery is out of sight, out of mind, by being done in another country.

    SkyezOpen ,

    I’ll have you know they do have machines in China. From my research (on liveleak) I also know that they tend not to have safety rails.

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