Chinese Labor Isn't Just Cheaper; It’s Better. We Need to Fix That.

A famous newspaper asked me to write an opinion article.

But every time I submitted a draft, they'd edit it, changing the message of the piece, even though the article was meant to be my opinion.

Most people would have consented to the edits to have the honor of being in the newspaper.

I decided not to be published and turned down the opportunity.

Here's the last draft of the article:

Chinese Labor Isn't Just Cheaper; It’s Better. We Need to Fix That.

Why is everything made in China?

Yes, the labor is cheaper, but that’s not really why.

The real why is hard to read.

America’s workers are in a sorry state.

Robots and AI won’t save us. China is installing more industrial robots per capita than we are. Even so, the flexible adaptable human will be working in manufacturing (alongside machines) for decades to come.

Manufacturing is about people, and ours need an upgrade.

For 15 years, I’ve been manufacturing in China, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. I have great respect for the people I’ve worked with and I want to see them and all Americans thrive, but to do that, we must first be honest with ourselves about the state of US manufacturing labor.

We are too fat to work in factories.

Manufacturing is not a desk job. You’re on your feet all day, walking miles in the factory. To make quality products at reasonable prices, your workers need to be efficient. The obese suffer from chronic pain, move too slowly, are prone to work-ending to injury, and cannot perform the movements necessary to make physical products.

We eat garbage.

Manufacturing is intellectually demanding work. With apologies to the makers of spreadsheets, legal pleadings, software, and newspaper columns, making physical things is harder than you think. The American manufacturing worker starts their day with processed food from a drive-through, while their competitor in China eats rice congee and brain-building fish. Who do you think is more likely to improve their manufacturing process?

We graduate but can’t do math.

“The 9’s always get me!” exclaimed a sincere but math-challenged new potential hire. Too many American workers cannot do their times tables without a calculator, slowing down and degrading their work. Despite our world-beating GDP, American PISA math scores are not only below average, but in decline. Last time China took the same test, they scored 24% better than the USA.

We don’t speak one language.

5,000 characters, every sound has four tones, and every sound-tone combination can have multiple meanings. Chinese is hard, but at least China has a single working language. In the US, English-speaking management struggles to communicate with the teams doing the hard work because they speak Spanish or other foreign languages.

We are on drugs.

In the US, not only will your team show up high, but it won’t show up at all, especially the day after it gets paid. If it’s not hard drugs, it’s industrial strength marijuana causing cognitive decline. When caught, employees lose their driver’s license and can’t get to work. Chinese workers walk to work, use safe public transport, or live in dormitories at the factory.

We come from broken homes.

In China, children are significantly more likely to grow up in 2 parent households, reducing the chance that an employee has to choose between their child’s needs and their job. Child support can cut an American parent’s wage by 60%, driving them to leave gainful manufacturing employment and turn to under-the-table cash odd jobs or dealing drugs.

We have too many HR problems to improve operations.

Before Americans can optimize our manufacturing processes, we must first navigate a human resource minefield of drug-addiction, violent felonies, and trouble at home to assemble a team, all while avoiding lawsuits. Making improvements on the factory floor is not easy while running what many in the industry call “adult daycare”.

Our social media is toxic to worker motivation and culture.

Open the apps to watch videos celebrating arriving to work late, 30 minute bathroom breaks, sky-high OnlyFans incomes, and step-by-step guides to filing discrimination lawsuits against your employer. Chinese social media is less demotivating and it shows. Chinese workers don’t storm off mid-shift and or hide in the corner to swipe their phone.

We taught our people to commit fraud instead of work.

The most efficient day laborer we ever had was acrobatic and on disability. During Covid, unemployment benefits exceeded employed worker incomes. These bad incentives have permanently damaged the psyche and spirit of our people.

And we don’t believe in the system, because it betrayed us.

Between 2015 and 2025 US manufacturing wages rose 40%, while the cost of purchasing a home rose 93%. Meanwhile, in China, manufacturing wages increased 110% while housing prices were flat. No wonder Chinese workers work harder. From houses to cars and washing machines, Chinese workers are more motivated to work because what they want keeps getting cheaper (and better) in terms of their wages.

In America, electrical engineers and computer science graduates, who otherwise might work in manufacturing, improving products and processes to make US products more competitive and by consequence increasing US manufacturing wages, instead, went into finance.

The incentives in the United States do not support a vibrant manufacturing economy and we’re kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.

The Chinese system is not holistically better. Unions are banned and employees do harder work for longer hours. But, if you look at our country vs. theirs in terms of speed, quality, and cost, we’re not just bad, America is getting worse.

The problem is fixable, but it will take decades. It’s not as simple as slapping some tariffs on Chinese goods and repeating nostalgic slogans of American greatness.

America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.

We need to start with open-mindedness. We need to be copying the best policies from other countries regardless of whether they are our allies, share our democratic values, or have “communist” in their name.

We need to play to our strengths. China will have world-beating semiconductor chips before they score a goal in soccer’s World Cup. But manufacturing and product development are like soccer, creative team-oriented problem solving. That and greenfield innovation are skills at which the United States thrives. And risk-taking, we have that in spades, especially when it comes to novel products and processes. And our people, we still have high expectations for product quality while China is still plagued by their “good-enough” chabuduo mentality.

Teddy Roosevelt said “complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining”.

Reforming the prison system to teach manufacturing instead of recidivism, strengthening English second language requirements at US schools, reducing English and history classes to increase math and science, longer school hours and less vacations, visas for manufacturing because America’s forgotten how it’s made, special economic lawsuit-free zones, worker dormitories, increasing teacher pay, zero income tax for manufacturing workers, managers, and owners (not tips!), cutting student loans for non-STEM fields, and making universities responsible for unpaid student debt.

You may hate these ideas and you might be right to, but it’s time to open up the conversation, because it’s becoming clearer every day that what we’re doing isn’t working.

And this isn’t about beating China.

It’s about doing the right thing for our country and our people, who do the hard, important work on which our cushy modern life relies.

Chinese labor may be cheaper, but ours can be better. Let’s make it happen.