According the article, and assuming Evergreen and China are honest about environmental regulations, the labor prices are not the real issue here. It's grants and loans made by the Chinese banks and local governments that are making up the bulk of the savings.
Still, $300 per month per employee in China vs $5400 in Massachusetts is going to turn some attention to China regardless of other costs.
This is the truly frustrating part of the article. It's so disheartening to hear that in spite of bailouts that we've made to the major financial institutions in the US, they won't lend to restart the economy and keep people employed.
Would be interesting to know how polluting these factories are. I visited a solar panel factory in China and it was pretty much as described here: clean, white rooms, automated machines, protective clothing for staff. Didn't look like there was much sign of pollution.
The other question is the long term effect of this export of work to China. Can they really make a profit at this rate, or are they hoping that by selling below cost and concentrating manufacturing within China they will eventually be able to invest in research at a better return and one day start extracting economic rents on their monopoly in manufacturing knowledge.
well, the other thing to consider is whether China is basically trying to do what Walmart did to it's competitors.
If you can undercut competition to the point where your competitors drop out, then you have free reign to do whatever you wish in the market, since you have a monopoly.
This depends on how quickly you can ramp up capacity if China starts to increase prices or decrease supply. My guess with developed countries is that the answer to that is "not quickly", as we tend to be more fastidious about bureaucracy. The rate of ramping back up capacity decreases even quicker once China starts to get an R&D advantage from economies of scale and years of research into improving their processes. Compare the hoo hah over rare earth metals.
Who's responsible for long-term planning of renewables in the US? The first result in DDG for "US renewable energy plan" is "US renewable energy plan 'shortsighted'":
China has dirt cheap labor, no pollution regulations and strong government support -- how can any US manufacturing survive against that?