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Originally Posted by Adam Y.
Thank you that makes sense. I wonder if people in the United States would actually be willing to do some of the jobs that the Chinese do. I ended up doing something that someone in China does normally just to double check their work. It had to be the most boring job in the world. This measurment had to be done on every single display that my company creates and I think on every single plasma display. It's called kickback voltage and it invovled staring at a multimeter. Please someone correct me if Im wrong. Im still in my second year of college and Im only an intern.
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Normally testing like that would be done with an automated test fixture here in the US. The circuit under test would be hit with a bed-of-nails connection, powered up, and fully tested with automated test equipment.
A test fixture like that might cost $100k to design and build, but if you use it to test 1,000,000 circuit boards then the automated test only cost ten cents a board.
In other parts of the world they may not bother with the test fixture. Instead they will pay some 12 year old girl $1 a day to sit and test boards all day long with a meter. If she happens to touch the live circuit and get electrocuted there are 100 girls waiting to get her job.
In a way this helps to illustrate what the speaker was talking about when he said how great the US is, and that greatness is the direct result of innovation and a continuous cycle of improvement. In China they can build the same products in factories that american workers can, but they have no Osha, they have no child labor laws, they have no worker protection laws, they have no minimum wage, and employers are not held accountable if workers are injured or killed on the job.