China's battery packs plummet in price again. Hydrogen prices didn't decline and BNEF triples its estimates for future costs. The implications are huge.
It’s totally not artificially low price of their currency propping exports. China totally wasn’t buying US bonds for decades to keep this up. No, this is marxist-lenninist social media, we believe in slaves here. Everything cheap=slaves. No other possibilities exist.
Extreme exploitation of labour (and in some cases, outright slavery) is a thing, and Chinese companies are no strangers to doing it. Independent trade unions don’t exist in China and their state sees independent political players as a threat. As a random and recent sample: Chinese maker of battery electric vehicles building a factory in South America - workers were found to have slave-like conditions.
However, Chinese companies are also pursuing automation and robotics very seriously.
The worker conditions in china are definetly shit, but I doubt slavery (and I mean real slavery, like gulags in USSR or cotton plantations in USA) have meaningful share in chineese GDP
Maybe it happens in isolated incidents but it’s certainly not widespread in any battery factories I’ve visited. These factories are incredibly automated because their government is pumping tons of money into battery manufacturing. Any foreign company purchasing these batteries is basically talking a subsidy from the Chinese government, it’s a good deal for everyone except the wider Chinese economy in the short term really.
Factory labor is typically from rural parts of the country where there is less opportunity, but the Chinese attitude toward holidays is much better than we have particularly in the USA. By coordinating the whole country gets several week long holidays a year to return to their hometowns or to do larger vacations with truly no pressure to think about work during that time. The standard of living in China has drastically risen over the previous 2 decades and companies simply can’t get away with the same level of poor working conditions they used to be able to. There’s a reason that so many companies are moving their manufacturing to other parts of SE Asia, labor in China simply isn’t that cheap anymore.
Implicatipns are simple and well known - chinese slave workers.
The sheer amount of slaves in China is impressive - they basically create everything over there it seems.
It’s totally not artificially low price of their currency propping exports. China totally wasn’t buying US bonds for decades to keep this up. No, this is marxist-lenninist social media, we believe in slaves here. Everything cheap=slaves. No other possibilities exist.
In reality, it’s a mix.
Extreme exploitation of labour (and in some cases, outright slavery) is a thing, and Chinese companies are no strangers to doing it. Independent trade unions don’t exist in China and their state sees independent political players as a threat. As a random and recent sample: Chinese maker of battery electric vehicles building a factory in South America - workers were found to have slave-like conditions.
However, Chinese companies are also pursuing automation and robotics very seriously.
The worker conditions in china are definetly shit, but I doubt slavery (and I mean real slavery, like gulags in USSR or cotton plantations in USA) have meaningful share in chineese GDP
Funny how you’re getting downvoted by people who just don’t want to admit that they’re encouraging it
Maybe it happens in isolated incidents but it’s certainly not widespread in any battery factories I’ve visited. These factories are incredibly automated because their government is pumping tons of money into battery manufacturing. Any foreign company purchasing these batteries is basically talking a subsidy from the Chinese government, it’s a good deal for everyone except the wider Chinese economy in the short term really.
Factory labor is typically from rural parts of the country where there is less opportunity, but the Chinese attitude toward holidays is much better than we have particularly in the USA. By coordinating the whole country gets several week long holidays a year to return to their hometowns or to do larger vacations with truly no pressure to think about work during that time. The standard of living in China has drastically risen over the previous 2 decades and companies simply can’t get away with the same level of poor working conditions they used to be able to. There’s a reason that so many companies are moving their manufacturing to other parts of SE Asia, labor in China simply isn’t that cheap anymore.