Made in America: The 33 Cent Chinese Arkansas T-Shirt
Recently my colleague Marco Chan shared an extraordinary story that puts a new slant on the public discussion about robotics, China, outsourcing and the future of jobs. According to this Bloomberg Business Week story, a Chinese manufacturer, Tianyuan Garments Co., is investing $20 million to open a plant in Little Rock that will utilize robots developed by a Georgia company, Software Automation, to manufacture T-Shirts at a cost of 33 cents per shirt. Each SEWBOT™ workline is capable of spitting out a T-Shirt every 26 seconds. Human workers don’t stand a chance against such competition, no matter how low a wage rate they are willing to accept.