Word: labors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...school educations--loans they didn't finish paying off until five or six years ago. (Though, of course, that would be Harvard Law School.) "This is a guy who, when he talks about his own life, has lived through some of the same stuff they are living through," says labor leader Anna Burger, the head of the Change to Win federation of unions, which has endorsed Obama. "The real campaign in the fall is going to be around the economy...
Most apparel manufacturers went overseas in search of cheaper labor years ago--90% of the clothes Americans buy come from places like China, Mexico, Bangladesh, Honduras, Indonesia and Vietnam. Nearly a million people in the U.S. worked in apparel manufacturing in 1990; today fewer than 200,000 do, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an obliteration of the field in less than 20 years. Yet within this classic example of globalization, Brooks Brothers has a message: Sometimes it makes sense to stay at home...
...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...