Apple Manufacturers Shifting iPhone Production from China to India and Vietnam
Richard Moorhead
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At least two companies relied upon by tech behemoth Apple are beginning to move manufacturing operations from China to countries such as Vietnam and India in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic.
Winstron Corp, one iPhone manufacturer, is already spending $1 billion to shift production to new facilities in Vietnam and and India. Another company, Pegatron, is planning on beginning iPhone production in Vietnam and Indonesia by 2021.
The underlying structure of neoliberal globalist corporations such as Apple has always been reliant on a supply of cheap labor to manufacture products sold in American and Europe, and the coronavirus epidemic is only the latest development to challenge the existing structure of a Chinese-dominated global manufacturing supply chain.
President Trump’s America First trade agenda has severely weakened the ability of global corporations to offshore their industries and facilities to China, but god forbid they’d consider bringing their manufacturing jobs and industry back to the United States. Companies like Pegatron and Winstron will gladly move away from China, which already has a comparatively aging population, to nations in which they can obtain a greater supply of cheap labor.
India in particular has increasingly structured its economy around the prospect of outsourcing American jobs and wealth to the country, possessing a population of 1.3 billion and what some global business executives are calling the ‘workforce of the future.’ India’s government is lobbying intensely in the United States to expand the existing H1B cheap labor visa system, a program that allows global corporations to replace American workers with Indian immigrants who will work for far less.
Apple has already been granted an extremely generous exemption from China tariffs, avoiding a 7.5% import tax that other companies manufacturing cheap goods in the communist country will pay to bring their products to the United States.
As global corporations such as Apple seek to outsource their industries from China, American policy makers must be prepared to institute new tariffs and trade measures to prevent the further loss of American industries to countries with poor labor and environmental standards.
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