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Cheap Labour in China.

Retrieved from: http://libcom.org/library/class-conflicts-transformation-china

 

Advertising is a big deal in YouTube. Almost every video with a large number of views will prompt an advertisement before it can be watched. Before writing this, I watched three random advertisements; the first was for a Mitsubishi car, the second was for Lynx deodorant and the last was for RACQ car insurance. The kinds of products and services that are offered by these ads are all luxuries, those that would concern people in first world countries.

As I am Australian, and using a Queensland IP address, the RACQ car insurance company saw fit to educate me on the fact that they were ‘Queensland’s largest club’ during their advertisement. On the other hand, Mitsubishi being a Japanese-founded car manufacturing company mentioned nothing about their background, instead filming their advertisement in a setting which looked very western. By displaying their advertisement like this they pull attention away from the much less romantic truth that these cars are mass produced in factories by means of cheap labour and robotics. At least, this kind of cheap labour might not last forever.

“The Boston Consulting Group reckons that in areas such as transport, computers, fabricated metals and machinery, 10-30% of the goods that America now imports from China could be made at home by 2020, boosting American output by $20 billion-S5 billion a year” (Economist, 2012).

However, if the end of cheap labour in countries such as China really does come, what would this mean for the rest of the world’s economy? Especially for countries such as Australia where 50% of our exports go to China and Japan, which is then shipped back as ‘stuff’ (Kuttainen, 2013).

Reference List:

Economist, The (2012) The Third Industrial Revolution. Retrieved from www.economist.com/node/21553017/

Kuttainen, V. (2013) BA1002: Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place. Lecture 8 [PowerPoint Slides]: Stuff: Markets & Manufacture. Retrieved from https://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au

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Cheap Labour in China.