Literally millions of Chinese workers at Foxconn and other companies are supplying the world with iPhones. It's not just Apple with its thousands of employees making and selling these phones.
Well even robots need some form of human supervision.
I remember reading a comment from Steve Jobs to Obama that he would never build a factory in the US due to overly burdensome regulations and the like.
When the dollar started collapsing around 2008, I asked some friends who ran operations for the big manufacturing companies as to why they wouldn't bring the jobs back stateside. It made intuitive sense to me: wages rising in China, cheaper dollar, higher fuel costs. Not to mention its always harder to run things when your employees are half a world away.
The universal reaction was no way they'd bring manufacturing jobs back. Reasons:
1. Don't want to deal with unions.
2. Don't want to deal with hidden costs like healthcare etc.
3. Too many regulations.
4. Just too hard to scale up or down. Apparently in China if you need to scale up your factory, you send a bus into the countryside to pick up villagers. Train them for 3 weeks and bam you have a factory worker. Who's living in your factory dorm, so they're available for over-time etc.
It sounded insane actually, I can't imagine any normal person wanting to work like this.
