Word: laborities
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...different from those of making, say, plain cotton underwear. About 70% of the cost of making a Brooks tie comes from materials (the company imports almost all its silk fabric from England and Italy), which leaves a fairly small fraction of the cost coming from labor. Compare that with making a Brooks shirt, for which the proportion is flipped--just 30% of the cost of production is from the material--and it's easy to see why chasing the least expensive workers isn't nearly as imperative in tie manufacturing as it might be elsewhere. There's also the convenient...
Something is about to change--but almost certainly for the worse. Higher labor costs, a strengthening Chinese currency and soaring raw-materials prices are bad enough. Now a slowdown in global growth and a likely full-blown recession in the U.S. are about to stress-test China's manufacturing sector like never before--and could result in the shuttering of thousands of factories and cost hundreds of thousands of workers their jobs. Makers of low-end goods are already suffering. The Guangdong city of Huidong was home to 3,000 shoe factories at the beginning of 2007, but as many...
Some are already starving. China's competitive advantage has been its armies of cheap workers, but that edge is getting dull. Labor costs have increased 50% in the past four years across southeastern provinces--an area of China sometimes called the "workshop of the world"--and a new labor law passed by Beijing will only add to the burden. Jonathan Anderson, an economist at UBS in Hong Kong, says factory owners in southern China believe the new law will drive labor costs an additional 10% to 25% higher. Among other provisions, the new law entitles laid-off workers...
...factors that might indicate the need for a C-section. But a combination of having watched traumatic vaginal deliveries in medical school and hearing about her mother's difficult emergency caesarean experience after trying to deliver vaginally helped make up her mind. "I had a fear of going through labor and ending up with an emergency C-section anyway. I know that's rare, but I didn't want to deal with it," she says...
...even taken together, all these factors don't explain the steep rise in caesareans over such a short time. Instead, says Eugene Declercq, a professor of maternal and child health at Boston University School of Public Health, the biggest change may simply be in the way we think about labor and delivery. In an increasingly technological and medicalized society, maybe even childbirth is losing some of its magic and becoming less about the miracle of life and more about simply getting a baby out safely and without incident. "We put a lot of emotional, psychological and spiritual value around birthing...