My Mega65 has arrived
&gt; In my view the ongoing race to the bottom of slave labour to make cheaper systems is not sustainable.<p>As someone who has worked in consumer electronics, and worked closely with the people who were on the factory line, employees on electronics manufacturing lines are not slave labor. They are often times well paid, with pay that would make for a good living in more rural parts of the US. After having worked on a production line for a year, they are in a good bargaining position to up their pay for the next year[1], sometime I got to witness as my team had to basically pay a bonus to get people to come back to work after the spring festival.<p>Do some employers suck? Of course[2]. It is important for the companies placing these orders to ensure workers are treated well, I know when I was at MSFT we had guidelines in place for worker treatment, including an increase minimum age for workers vs what the local law allowed.<p>I also don&#x27;t think a lot of people realize that for any production line in China making complicated American designed electronics, that there are likely Americans also on the factory floor helping things out! Especially at the beginning of the production run. None of the people I know who were on the factory floor would have been silent if they had seen abuses, abuses of the people they worked day in and day out with for weeks and sometimes months.<p>I&#x27;m not saying horrible abuses don&#x27;t happen, but I am saying that it is possible, and not some insanely difficult task, to responsibly manufacture goods in China, or any other country for that matter.<p>BTW, everything is made in China because China has a ton of local expertise, engineering talent, and ease of sourcing parts. For complicated to make products, the labor savings really isn&#x27;t the big driver.<p>[1] Yield rates go up significantly with experienced employees.
[2] There is a lot of pressure to make release dates for consumer electronics, missing certain holidays for release means an entire product may not sell enough units to be profitable anymore. Does this mean crap tons of stress for everyone involved? Unfortunately yes, if you work in higher end consumer electronics you will see people fall apart all around you, it is a very high stress environment. It sucks that the stress is also put on the lowest paid workers in the chain, and more needs to be done to stop that from happening.