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05/15/2008: "Chinese refusing to work for lowest paid jobs - companies relocating to Vietnam"

What can Western companies do when China's factory workers start demanding better wages and conditions? Easy -- just transfer production to a cheaper country. China's loss is Vietnam's gain.

There is a shortage of 2 million workers in the Pearl River Delta alone, China's industrial zone abutting Hong Kong, where companies from Adidas to Mattel have their products manufactured. The manufacturers there compete relentlessly for labor, fighting desperately for each worker. This struggle marks a new chapter in the history of globalization.

For a long time, it seemed as if China, with its 1.3 billion people, offered the world an inexhaustible reservoir of low-wage workers.

China's planners know that their country has no future as a low-cost producer. Following in the footsteps of Japan and South Korea, they are converting their industrial base, hoping to catapult Chinese industry to the high-tech level. It is a change that Beijing's communist strategists are promoting as energetically as only dictatorships can.

[ It's amazing how quickly the world is changing. ]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,553301,00.html