this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2024
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Electric Vehicles

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Electric Vehicles are a key part of our tomorrow and how we get there. If we can get all the fossil fuel vehicles off our roads, out of our seas and out of our skies, we'll have a much better environment. This community is where we discuss the various different vehicles and news stories regarding electric transportation.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Implicatipns are simple and well known - chinese slave workers.

[–] Mihies 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The sheer amount of slaves in China is impressive - they basically create everything over there it seems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's totally not artificially low price of their currency propping exports. China totally wasn't buying US bonds for decades to keep this up. No, this is marxist-lenninist social media, we believe in slaves here. Everything cheap=slaves. No other possibilities exist.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

In reality, it's a mix.

Extreme exploitation of labour (and in some cases, outright slavery) is a thing, and Chinese companies are no strangers to doing it. Independent trade unions don't exist in China and their state sees independent political players as a threat. As a random and recent sample: Chinese maker of battery electric vehicles building a factory in South America - workers were found to have slave-like conditions.

However, Chinese companies are also pursuing automation and robotics very seriously.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

In reality, it's a mix.

The worker conditions in china are definetly shit, but I doubt slavery (and I mean real slavery, like gulags in USSR or cotton plantations in USA) have meaningful share in chineese GDP

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Funny how you're getting downvoted by people who just don't want to admit that they're encouraging it

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Maybe it happens in isolated incidents but it's certainly not widespread in any battery factories I've visited. These factories are incredibly automated because their government is pumping tons of money into battery manufacturing. Any foreign company purchasing these batteries is basically talking a subsidy from the Chinese government, it's a good deal for everyone except the wider Chinese economy in the short term really.

Factory labor is typically from rural parts of the country where there is less opportunity, but the Chinese attitude toward holidays is much better than we have particularly in the USA. By coordinating the whole country gets several week long holidays a year to return to their hometowns or to do larger vacations with truly no pressure to think about work during that time. The standard of living in China has drastically risen over the previous 2 decades and companies simply can't get away with the same level of poor working conditions they used to be able to. There's a reason that so many companies are moving their manufacturing to other parts of SE Asia, labor in China simply isn't that cheap anymore.