The Price Paid - Part Two

We are relying more and more on technology in more and more aspects of our lives.  For business, social and entertainment we are quick to reach for the latest gadget.  But the workforces that are employed to produce those gadgets do not even earn enough to buy one of the products they spend 60 hours a week assembling.  In a video on Live Leak a young woman is handed an I-Pad that she should be intimately familiar with, after all she spends 60 hours every week contributing to making the devices.  She smiles as she handles the device, there is almost an element of pride in the workmanship of the sophisticated device.

Logo: Ross Justin00
Wikimedia Commons

This faceless workforce goes largely unconsidered  by those in the West that actively and almost religiously consume the latest and smartest technology.  This video gives a very human face to the workers.  With her identity concealed she speaks freely about how hard the worker's are pushed physically, the long hours and the volume of work that they are expected to complete during their shift.   

The culture is one of obedience and surveillance and workers are instructed to never talk to the media.  The young woman compared her life to that of an animal, only having enough time and energy to work, eat and sleep.  The major players are very quick to issue media releases to say they have INVESTIGATED issues and that they value every single one of their employees.  But this one employee stated clearly that she did not feel valued or looked after.  She also had no voice with which to make herself heard.  In the West this workforce is voiceless and faceless as mainstream news outlets never investigate or research the stories of those that fill our consumer markets with new technological gadgets and devices for us to desire and consume.

Unless otherwise stated all images have been sourced from Wikimedia Commons and have been assigned a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License or are from the Public Domain

All of my artworks unless otherwise stated are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license (Version 4.0 (international licence)

Production, Consumption and the New Industrial Revolution

3D Printing and the New Industrial Revolution

Illustration by
OR drowhowa Wikimedia commons

There is no doubt that technology is taking us into new and exciting territory.  Victoria Craw wrote recently in a News.com article that 3-D printer technology is set to become the new industrial revolution.  In the article Dominic Parsonson, Tasman Machinery’s national sales manager, pointed out that the only limit to 3D printers is whether or not they are able to process the material used to manufacture the product.  This technology is an exciting, and advantageous, development for countries like Australia where high wages and the legal responsibilities of using a local workforce to manufacture at home has meant that we've outsourced our manufacturing to countries that can offer large workforces at a cheap price.  This outsourcing has had a huge impact on our economy and our manufacturing industries have become a distant and historical memory.  Our shop shelves are now largely filled with products made overseas.

The Forgotten Workforce

So what will the consequences of this exciting new technology be for the workforces that we have been using

Factory workers
Wikimedia Commons

to fill our consumer marketplace with a constant supply of new products if 3D printing makes it viable for us to manufacture locally?  Harvard Business Review author Richard A. D’Aveni suggests that the factors that have made countries like China the “workshop of the world”  will lose their impact as the West becomes able to produce goods closer to the location where they are to be consumed.  For counties such as China who have built economies that depend heavily on providing the west with cheap labour the effects of 3D technology could be catastrophic.  For the workers it will be felt even more so.  For these workers there will be no safety net to break their fall when they are made redundant when their labour is no longer required by the west.  There will be no welfare system to tide them over until they can retrain themselves for other work and little or no support to retrain.

For many years now the west has used these work forces to saturate their consumer marketplace with new commodities and build up strong economies.  If our western manufacturers adopt 3D printing technology and begin to produce goods locally our own economies will flourish as more people are employed locally in the manufacturing sector to fill our store shelves.  But what will the human cost be for the workforces that currently produce the goods that stock our shelves?

It all bears thinking about as we stand at the cusp of the new industrial revolution.

Unless otherwise stated all images have been sourced from Wikimedia Commons and have been assigned a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License or are from the Public Domain
All of my artworks unless otherwise stated are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license (Version 4.0 (international licence)