Chinese social media users have mocked Donald Trump with an AI-generated video showing overweight Americans working in factories.
A viral 30-second clip shows a series of miserable-looking rotund Americans slowly sewing garments and building smartphones on crowded shop floors.
The video, which is set to Chinese music, is called “make America great again” and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
edit: added youtube link
Are they trying to say it’s inherently miserable to work in a factory? So let Chinese workers do it instead of Americans?
It shouldn’t be miserable to work in a factory. The overhead pneumatic drill shown towards the end is just like a drill I used when I worked in a factory one summer in Chicago. It was perfectly safe, and the people I worked with were well compensated. (I was not, because I was only 16.)
I think people in China might have this attitude because to them, it usually is unsafe, miserable, and underpaid. There is no proper unionization in China, and no OSHA, so it’s always bad.
In 2019, when I visited a Chinese factory for work, the assembly line was tight enough that all the workers bumped elbows constantly. One person had a very loud compressed air tube to clean off components, and wore hearing protection and safety glasses. The person next to them had no hearing protection. Another person was testing blindingly bright LED shop lights, and wore sunglasses, but the people next to them had no protection. This would have been considered totally unsafe in the US.
I doubt much manufacturing will return to the US, but if it does, then even by 2025 standards it wouldn’t be as bad as in China. With OSHA gutted by the current Republican administration, it’s getting worse, but we still have more worker’s rights than workers in China.
The way capitalism works, the manufacturing won’t return until the conditions are so monstrously cost-saving as to be as bad as China’s.
The conditions will worsen until manufacturing returns.
We also have about a 1/5th of the population. Labors cheap in China comparatively because there’s so much of it.
Do you really think Trump won’t be shipping union organizers off to CECOT? “Next they came for the trade unionists,” after all.
Yes, I think he will (except the ones that fall over to threats, and give in to 47’s demands).
But that’s not the point. It’s possible to have a safe factory staffed by happy, well-paid workers. If it were actually true that manufacturing would return to the US as a result of the tariffs, that manufacturing shouldn’t be considered an inherently bad thing.
And the thing is, when magats talk about manufacturing, that’s what they’re envisioning.
That said, sewing is generally understood to be shit work in manufacturing