alt Hacker NewsThe only reason why the shirt is cheap is because we value your labor in the dollars an hour and the shirt maker's labor in the pennies.
Now what if you made that same $5 a week as the shirt maker. Is that $22 shirt still cheap? How many might you own? Now think of what shirt the $5 week shirt maker is wearing. It says Chicago Bulls on it and was given to them by a nonprofit. The nonprofit only had this shirt available because people like him make 1000 shirts a day to sell to westerners to wear for a few weeks collectively before they give it for free to goodwill.
Does this seem like a sustainable, scalable system of resource and labor distribution to you? Or is it based entirely on the fact that there exist some orphan crushing machine still in some corner of the world to make it seem cheap and frictionless for those of us in the global 1%?
No it wouldn’t. American Apparel used to (maybe it still does) make its shirts in a factory in Los Angeles, and its shirts were not noticeably more expensive than the likes of Abercrombie that made clothes overseas. AA couldn’t have competed in the lower end of the market, but their clothes were still not astronomically expensive because the factory was already heavily automated via machines.
The larger cost for a lot of manufacturing in the richest countries is permitting and regulation, plus the fact that the manufacturing knowledge cluster is concentrated in China now, making every part of setting up a factory there smoother.