It has happened because rich-world companies have replaced workers with new technology to boost productivity and shifted production from labour-intensive products such as textiles to higher-tech, higher value-added, sectors such as pharmaceuticals.
In Dongguan, factory managers face the choice of increasing wages (which they have hardly adjusted for years), shifting to less labour-intensive production or moving to areas where cheap labour is more abundant.
For the majority of German workers, companies' growing willingness to shift production to wherever labour and capital costs are cheapest is a direct threat to their jobs.
It uses a more labour-intensive production system than the Japanese firms it competes with to take advantage of low labour costs.
In farming, just as in anything else, the classical factors of production are land, labour and capital.
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South Wales West AM Dai Lloyd AM said he was worried about steel slab production moving to cheaper labour markets.
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But the realisation that the cost of east German labour and production had priced itself out of the market quickened the spiral of joblessness and emigration.
Globalised production lines, globalised labour markets, commodity markets, culture - all this acts like social superglue preventing any politician from even contemplating an overt protectionist or state-capitalist response.
The way the 206 model is set to live on in Eastern European factories is in line with the car maker's strategy to shift production to countries where labour costs are lower than in Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe, Mr Nagley observes.
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Fuel shortages and labour disputes hampered production last year but it should now rebound strongly.
With most of the work done by hand without any help from modern technology, its production is a lengthy and labour-intensive process.
Where there is not the requirement to poach labour, but where it is possible to bring new labour into the production system.
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Because of inflexibility in the labour market and high labour costs, German companies do much of their labour-intensive production abroad, keeping the capital-intensive operations at home.
But rather than set up production in a country with labour costs as high as Germany, Siemens could have entered into a joint-venture with an Asian manufacturer.
"The rise in the number of businesses in recent years shows that a recession can be an excellent time to start a business, " he states in his report, adding that "factors of production such as premises and labour can be cheaper and higher quality, meaning that return on investment can be greater".
Last year and this, most of these companies had reached a point at which only a reduction in their labour costs would support continued production on their home soil.
Next to the garment district in an even more insalubrious part of the city, heavily populated with drunks is Toy-town, home to more than 100 businesses, most of them owned by Chinese immigrants who specialise in managing production chains that link Chinese capital and labour with western designers and marketers.
Thus they use production methods that use a lot of cheap human labour.
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The logic that is driving other manufacturing industries to move production to China skilled but very cheap labour therefore does not apply.
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In Italy, Merloni, despite its unusually good labour relations, cannot mirror in its production cycle the highly seasonal demand for fridges and freezers.
He claimed that a male partner in the delivery room can make a woman more anxious, slowing the production of oxytocin, a hormone which helps the labour process.
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Mr Mitarai told The Economist recently that he has a rough cut-off rule for allocating investment: anything for which labour comprises more than 5% of production costs can be done in China or some other low-wage country.
As we curious shaved apes play around with stuff and work out new methods of doing things we reduce the amount of labour necessary to provide any given level of production.
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When production jobs moved en masse to China and other cheap labour destinations, rich-world governments did not worry unduly because they thought that their workers could glide painlessly from manufacturing jobs to service jobs.
Platinum production fell by 29%, following almost two months of labour unrest.
For a real solution to its problems, Airbus must take more drastic action, such as doing away with the politically motivated division of labour between German, French, Spanish and British production sites.
As resources such as labour and capital are released from intermediate activities into the production of goods, the overall supply of goods will increase and prices will fall.
Similarly, we would assume that a factory using US labour to produce something at US labour rates would substitute capital for labour to the same extent: would, essentially, automate production.
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Such competition must be curbed with restrictions on labour migration from eastern Europe, subsidies for rich-country production and lots of harmonisation including that old dream of the left, a European minimum wage.
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The stereotype has giant companies shifting production from one country to another in search of the cheapest sources of labour, without regard for the well-being of either the high-wage workers who stand to lose their jobs or the low-paid ones who will be hired.
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