Why not get them made locally, in the country where you’re selling them?
Question: if the makers have reached that stage of manufacturing, and if mass production isn’t in line with the Maker ethos, once Makers start mass producing in China, does that mean they’ve ceased to be Makers?
Two points:
One thing I discovered with my ventures into making - because of expensive materials and equipment - I had to either get my projects to pay for themselves or start working with cheaper stuff. One outcome of this was that I had to hone my selling skills and spend as much time selling as I did making.
If I were going to take it full time, or even make it a profitable sideline, one conclusion would have been to focus on selling, and outsource the making to people who could do it more cheaply than I could. I ended up getting out of that field altogether instead.
Regarding offshoring electronics assembly work - I worked for a couple of electronics firms here in the US, four years in a union shop and two years in a smaller, non-union one. I would love to see more manufacturing done here and more jobs kept in the US. Unfortunately I don’t know how profitable it would be since American consumers seem to demand almost unrealistically low prices.
The unionized shop I was in worked on US military contracts building technology they weren’t willing to offshore, and the other outfit did small production runs for companies who were working out the bugs in their products before sending the bulk of manufacturing offshore. We were just glad to get whatever contracts we could get. I left the company several years ago and they have since gone out of business.
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I’ll be happy to learn what you claim. Provide proof please. And while pay and some conditions might be improving at the big factories doing work for the like of Apple, it will be years if never when their price competitors catch up.
I would hazard that’s an understatement. Those factories probably don’t make their workers live in cramped, unsanitary dormitories, and the barbed wire is truly there to keep unauthorized people out and not the workers in. They are probably not working illegal overtime, and are allowed to sit if it does not interfere with the job they are doing.
You can be competitive, or ethical. You can’t be both and the terrible truth is: It’s not your fault. Welcome to a global system that is bigger than any of the players involved.
this was really interesting, thanks for posting. there are only a few minutes of ‘blackout’ at the start of the recording and the rest is fine.
it’s great that people like bunnie share their experiences with this. personally i think it does fit with the maker ethos to manufacture your product in another country, but i imagine there are as many different opinions on this as there are makers. at least bunnie and his team went to the factory and were involved in the process.
the only thing that made me go ‘hmmm…’ was when he mentioned that the factory owner had the production facility running 24/7 to get something done quickly and didn’t even charge bunnie any overtime. of course, i don’t know the details of the situation, but i do think that the client (in this case, bunnie) has an obligation to ask who is paying for the overtime and make sure they’re not turning a blind eye to exploitation. quite possibly he did ask… i’m just sayin’, is all.
Personally I don’t think mass production is necessarily contrary to the maker ethos. Think of it as the next step, if your product catches on.
And, from a “maker” perspective, if you are going to be having it produced by someone that isn’t you, how does producing it by a big giant company in the U.S. differ from using a big giant company in China? In both cases, you’re no longer handling all the manufacturing yourself.
Not that Bunnie is or should be restricted by any definition of Maker anyway.
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