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Global Alert From Chongqing: Foxconn Strike Is An Epochal Inflection Point

STOCKMAN’S CORNER
Global Alert From Chongqing: Foxconn Strike Is An Epochal Inflection Point
by David Stockman • October 9, 2014

Foxconn workers are striking again – this time in Chongqing. But you have to look at the map to see why this is an event of extraordinary significance. In a word, these strikes mean that the rice paddies of China have been nearly drained of cheap, docile labor.

So the strikes in Chongqing are of global and potentially epochal significance. It was the two-decades-long flow of quasi-slave labor into the export factories of east China that enabled the major global central banks to go on a money printing rampage like the world has never before seen. The latter was conducted with apparent impunity because during that same period the induction of several hundred million peasants into the world’s factory system caused worldwide prices of consumer goods to fall, even as the money printers were enabling an orgy of credit-fueled spending by American and European households.

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In short, there are few rice paddies west of Chongqing to drain because no one lives there. And this means the closing of the world’s cheap labor frontier is at hand.

Indeed, it had been approaching for several years now as Chinese manufacturers desperately migrated westward, attempting to perpetuate a regime of ultra-cheap factory labor. This perverse arrangement is virtually symbolized by Foxconn’s million plus workers in sweatshops throughout China—-factories which keep the likes of Apple, HPQ, Sony, Samsung and all the rest, as well as their American and European customers, in cheap gadgets, cheap electronics and cheap computers. But economically speaking, China’s cheap labor frontier has now it reached its Pacific Ocean equivalent.

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Full text see:

Global Alert From Chongqing: Foxconn Strike Is An Epochal Inflection Point

Related Report about the Foxconn-Workers-Strike see:
http://online.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-workers-walk-off-job-at-chinese-plant-1412854102?KEYWORDS=foxconn/?mod=mktw

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Martin Zeis
globalcrisis/globalchange News
martin.zeis@gmxpro.net