The Era of Ultracheap Stuff Is Under Threat

livemint.com:

TikTok and other social media, are deciding their work lives shouldn’t unfold inside factory walls. Demographic shifts are playing a role. Young people in Asia are having fewer children than their parents did, and at later ages, which means they are under less pressure to earn a steady income in their 20s.

A booming services sector offers the option of less-grueling work as store clerks in malls and receptionists at hotels. The problem is acute in China, where urban youth unemployment hit 21% in June even though factories had labor shortages. Multinational companies have been moving production from China to nations including Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and India.

Factory owners there said they, too, are struggling to get young people to sign up. Factory wages in Vietnam have more than doubled since 2011, to $320 a month—three times the rate of increase in the U.S., according to data from the United Nations International Labor Organization. In China, factory wages rose 122% from 2012 to 2021, the latest period for which the U.N.

data is available. Earlier this year, Nguyen Anh Tuan, a 25-year-old Vietnamese high-school graduate, quit his job as a mechanic at a suburban Hanoi car-parts factory to work as a motorbike driver for Grab, the local Uber equivalent. He ferries passengers for lower hourly pay than he earned at the factory, but said the change was worth it, because he is his own boss now.

“My supervisors often made very unpleasant remarks, which stressed me out," Tuan said of his three years at the factory. Factory work would tempt him again only if his old monthly salary of $400 doubled, he said. In the past, manufacturers might simply have moved to less expensive destinations.