Suicides and strikes! China's cheap-labor days end?

Editor's Note: The following report is excerpted from Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium online newsletter published by the current No. 1 best-selling author, WND staff writer and columnist. Red Alert subscriptions are $99 a year or $9.95 per month for credit card users. Annual subscribers will receive a free autographed copy of "The Late Great USA," a book about the careful deceptions of a powerful elite who want to undermine our nation's sovereignty.

Strikes and suicides have rocked China's workforce, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports. Could this be the end of cheap labor as we know it?

Labor unrest that began in China's industrial heartland in the south is spreading throughout the nation, creating a new challenge for Beijing.

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"The spate of strikes and suicides that have rocked China's southern manufacturing belt over the last fortnight could well go down as the moment China stopped being a place of endless cheap labor," Financial Times writer Geoff Dyer explained.

Red Alert reported on a spate of suicides at a Foxconn electronics plant in Shenzhen in southern China that employs between 300,000 to 400,000 workers in 12-hour shifts assembling iPads for Apple, plus cell phones, computers and a wide range of other computer devices for Sony, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Nokia.

Equally defining is a strike of Honda workers at an 1,800-strong employee plant in Foshan, a factory town in the southern Guangdong province that manufactures transmissions for the Japanese carmaker.

Production last week remained stalled at the Honda components factory, despite a 24-percent wage-increase offer that would have boosted the average monthly salaries at the factory to $280 a month.

The Honda workers, pressing for a 30-percent wage increase, rejected the offer, deciding instead to continue their strike.

"Red Alert doubts this trend means an end to U.S. multinational corporations outsourcing manufacturing jobs to China," Corsi wrote.

Even with wage gains in the range of 20 to 30 percent, Chinese workers will continue to be paid a small fraction of what U.S. workers expect to be compensated.

Still, Corsi explained, labor discontent in China is inevitable, given the extent to which the Chinese economy has been built upon the premise that Chinese workers can be exploited without repercussions.

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He wrote, "As soon as multinational corporations become unable to reliably exploit Chinese manufacturing labor, the allure of outsourcing will rapidly fade."

To learn more about labor unrest in China, read Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium, online intelligence news source by the WND staff writer, columnist and author of the New York Times No. 1 best-seller, "The Obama Nation."

Red Alert's author, whose books "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command" have topped the New York Times best-sellers list, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972. For nearly 25 years, beginning in 1981, he worked with banks throughout the U.S. and around the world to develop financial services marketing companies to assist banks in establishing broker/dealers and insurance subsidiaries to provide financial planning products and services to their retail customers. In this career, Corsi developed three different third-party financial services marketing firms that reached gross sales levels of $1 billion in annuities and equal volume in mutual funds. In 1999, he began developing Internet-based financial marketing firms, also adapted to work in conjunction with banks.

In his 25-year financial services career, Corsi has been a noted financial services speaker and writer, publishing three books and numerous articles in professional financial services journals and magazines.

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