I grew up in Winnipeg and went back there to raise my kids. I've bought a lot of winter clothing in my time. By now, I'd say I know something about what it takes to stay warm even when it's 40 below.
Recently, I was in Winnipeg again. While I was there, I bought myself a new winter jacket -- and a lesson in global economics.
This jacket is, by far, the most complicated piece of clothing I have ever owned. There is an outer shell with a removable fur-trimmed hood and a reversible inner jacket, which already makes it four jackets in one. (Yes, four: the outer shell, the inner jacket, the inner jacket reversed, and then the whole assembly. That's not even counting with or without the hood.) But... this is only the beginning. There are pockets everywhere; there are pockets I will never use. There's a zippered mesh vent under each sleeve. There are nylon zippers, velcro fasteners, tabs with snaps, and pull-cords with nylon locks, all over it. Every time I think I've figured it all out, I look again, and find another control to adjust something I'd never even dreamed I'd want to change.
Moreover, the quality of workmanship is superb. Every detail is perfectly done. There are no hanging threads, no crooked seams. All the fasteners, fittings, and zippers work. The grey and white outer shell is accented with crisp black piping. It's not only an intricate design, it looks great.
Exploring this jacket of mine is like nothing in life so much as wandering through a new piece of software. Knobs to twiddle everywhere. A true geek's toy, if geeks ever cared about clothing.
It wasn't cheap, this geeky jacket with its hyper-complicated design. Okay, so I bought late in the season and got it on sale at half price; for me it was a great deal. But the original tag was $160 Cdn, not exactly Wal-Mart pricing. On the other hand, when you think about the skilled labor needed to do all of that precision sewing on one garment, it was a lot cheaper than you'd expect.
Where was it made? China, of course.
You knew I was going to draw a political moral, didn't you? This is, after all, Daily Kos.
The design is plainly derived from those aimed at rich ski enthusiasts headed for Aspen or Banff. In the past, I suppose the only place you'd find such a jacket would be in expensive specialty ski shops, and you would probably expect to pay at least $500 for it. Since I never frequent expensive specialty shops of any description, my title is hyperbole; to be more accurate, it's just the geekiest winter jacket I've ever owned in my life.
The point is, we see here proof that, in one industry at least, China is already doing more than turning out cheap, shoddy goods at garage-sale prices. They have garment workers that are capable of equalling or surpassing the best quality any American factory could produce. Nobody should be surprised at this - nobody, that is, who has seen the highly skilled garment work China had long been accustomed to in its own domestic market. However, here we have a "high geek value" extreme-cold design from North America mated with quality craftsmanship from China. The result... The result is luxury goods at prices even people like me can afford.
The result also turns into a conclusion, and a warning: no North American industry should feel immune because those low-wage Chinese workers couldn't possibly compete at the high end, not against real North American quality. My jacket shows it's not true even now. It's going to become less and less true as time goes on.
Ask Intel why their latest pure research facility is located in China. It's not because they are in need of cheap, Wal-Mart-quality research, that's for sure. It's because Chinese universities these days are turning out large numbers of top-end scientists in leading edge fields. More, in fact, than in North America. Intel isn't even thinking about wages; the potential benefits to Intel from being there first with the most advanced technology so far outweigh labor costs, that pay scales aren't on the map.
What's the answer?
Fair trade, okay. Those skilled Chinese garment workers ought to be allowed to have a union if they want one. (For that matter, American workers ought to be allowed the same privilege; too many of them aren't, any more.) But that isn't going to solve the problem for the North American garment industry. A fair wage in China is still going to be a lot lower than a fair wage in North America, if only because their cost of living is so much lower. What can anyone do about that... somehow force China to raise the price of rice by a factor of ten? Not going to happen.
In the long run, these things will even out. Which of us, even knowing all the suffering that the changes entailed for those living through it, would wish the industrial revolution not to have taken place? Some new picture is going to emerge at the end of this, and our descendants living in that future age, assuming we haven't managed to kill them all off with global warming, will take their current arrangements for granted.
Unfortunately, that isn't much consolation to the workers being displaced now.
I now open the floor to discussion...