"SMuel10363" wrote in message
...
The official minimum wage in China is 31 cents/hour. In the interior,
footwear and textile workers often are paid 17 cents/hour. In the coastal
cities, the "illegal immigrants" (those are the rural peasants who moved
to
the cities without permission; the number is well up in the millions)
also
make less than 31 cents/hour.

I build die cast dies for both China and Mexico. The full burden
rate(labor
+overhead)at the Mexico die caster is $3.48 per hour,the China die caster
is
$1.42 U.S. dollarsThe mexcio die caster is screaming over loss of work to
China They are also seeing cast and trim type die casting coming back
to
the states due to cost The work they can keep has a lot of vlue added work
done
in order to get to the $3.48 figure Ray Mueller

Those burden rates are in the same ballpark I've heard, Ray.

BTW, one of the molder/moldmaker operations in China that we talked about in
an article earlier this year was full of new Charmilles CNC EDMs, and had
about 80 Krauss-Maffel molding presses, half of them with robotic unloaders.
Not bad, huh? Have you ever seen a molder with 80 Krauss-Maffels in the US?
I haven't. That would be one heck of a slick operation over here. It's one
heck of a slick operation in China, too, I suppose. And it's enough to
squelch any ideas that they're behind the curve in machine technology.

Charmilles builds those EDM machines in China, BTW. A Charmilles exec in the
US says they're about as good as the ones they sell here.

Ed Huntress