are there affordable alternatives to manufacturing in Chinese sweatshops?
551896
Nope.\nSoon all manufactoring will be done in Chinese sweatshops and the Chinese government has implemented a 1 kid per family ratio when the demand for cheaper child labour will soon be at an alltime high?\nShesh....
554650
IN THE SHOPS OR ANY FACTORY
849794
No shitt, it's just the big wigs trying to compete with china's cheap labor at the expense of our country's values.\nI'm sick of it. I think any company doing this should be shut down and the owners prosecuted
851734
I'm not sure that it is. In China wages are so low that people have to work long hours just to survive. In Japan big companies have traditionally  had a master/serf relationship with their employees. In the UK we expect decent wages and decent work conditions so that we can have a life outside work.\nDo you really think this is unreasonable of us?
97161
Try www.alibaba.com this is a B2B portal with a lot of Chinese contacts.Good luck.
1142281
No greater chance than anyone not from the US or UK\n\nIt's actually more likely that you wouldn't come back as a Chinese baby, but if you did - would that be so bad?\nThat's where all the manufacturing jobs seem to be!\n l☺l
956622
When American manufacturers first starting closing down their domestic plants and opening up plants in China, They could hire 149 Chinese workers for the cost of 1 American worker. This discrepancy hasn't changed much over the years. American labor just cannot compete with overseas labor.
556401
try tdctrade.com its a database of suppliers from China. You can also try kompass.com they are a big business directory. Also look for tidbits on ebay. Let me know how it goes. Good luck!
651364
Singapore is a great transit point into the Malay peninsula and of course it is close to China. Singapore is pretty much tapped out other than its strategic location. It would be hard to justify a manufacturing center or something like that, with land and everything being so expensive. Companies based in Singapore may be a geat idea.
930794
You need to find business in Pakistani who are exproting goods to China.  Pakistani businesses is where you want to be.  Start there and work your way up from there.
419630
Yes. As a matter of fact, I never buy products of any of the following brands: Nike, Addidas, Puma, Disney (or any related subsidiary), The Gap, McDonald's, most jeans, and many others.\nI always look to where the products were made before buying them, not because I believe in "consumer power", but because I'd rather pay less and have a clear conscience, than buy into the whole marketing consumerist bullsh*t and become just another sheep in the flock so that a few hundred or so CEOs can continue to get richer at the expense of the rest of the world.\n\nEDIT: To the person that said that she can't afford better clothing...you are very confused. Sometimes, locally made products actually cost *less* than sweatshop-made-clothing.\nFor example, a pair of Nike shoes only cost around $15 for the company to manufacture ($13-14 for materials and shipping costs + 10 cents per hour to the workers that manufacture them), yet Nike sells you their snickers at around $80. That sounds like a rip off, to me, specially when you can get locally-manufactured snickers at a much lower price.\n\nEDIT Number 2 (sorry): To the person who posted below me... Large companies are the ones that, in partnership with the US government, help to keep dictatorships in countries like China, Pakistan, and others so that wages in those countries remain low. \nIf the support to those dictatorships was lifted, and a real democracy could thirve, people in those countries would become freer to associate themselves and demand better wages and working rights.\nRemember, the bussiness leaders *need* the workers. If we would smarten up, and join to fight together against them, we would realise that we are the ones in the position to make demands, not them.\n\nBesides... the position of not caring about sweatshops is a dangerous one. Because their appearance also causes factories in the first world to close, unemployment to rise, middle classes to dissapear and proper jobs to be replaced with a posts at fast food chains. By closing well-payed production in the first world and replacing it with sweatshops in third world dictatorships and weak democracies, the practice of outsourcing is not only affecting people in the third world, it's also affecting the west too.
766193
If it's not on the 10K, then maybe you'll have to look at something like Gartner Dataquest to find estimates for microprocessor sales in China and then assume a marketshare number and an average selling price.  That should give you a decent idea.  You could also build an estimate by looking for numbers about PC sales in China.  I would think most would be run by Intel processors.
480356
A simple project for students would be to have them estimate the prices of some of the name brand clothes they are wearing in class that day (or wear often). This could also include book bags, purses, whatever they have in class.\n\nThen you give students a listing of some of the yearly incomes of sweatshop workers in some of the major corporations that they will have most likely selected (Nike, gap....) \n\nLastly you can have them calculate how long it would take a sweatshop worker to buy everything they have with them at the prices they have estimated. \n\nShould open some eyes a little bit.
117275
Try oriental trading. They have a ton of craft projects and stuff.
430859
Great!!\nGood criticism.\nI think that China has such powerful econimic policies that even the US firms have opened their offices in China.\nThey have such a cheap manpower that every company would like to work in China and probably this is the reason that even the US stickers are made in China.
610379
When I was young, all the cheap stuff was imported from Japan. Now a whole bunch of expensive stuff in imported from Japan. In the process, Japanese society has undergone a major transformation. I imagine the same will happen with China. Twenty years from now, the cheap stuff will probably be made in some other developing country because China's economy and ambitions will have grown. Even now, this is beginning to happen. Is the stuff from China worth buying? Some of it may represent a good value. A wise consumer considers each purchase carefully. Cheap doesn't always mean a bargain, if the product doesn't hold up.
558960
It's not it's just cheaper to outsource the labor. I'm not trying to state anything but a fact, services are better off being produced in this country while many industrial goods are made more cheaply overseas.