Global supply chains raise the rate of exploitation far above nineteenth-century factories

Evidence

Researchers have calculated that the rate of exploitation of workers to produce the iPhone X (the 2017 model) is twenty-five times higher than that in nineteenth-century factories at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The same researchers have also highlighted another fact: if Apple were to produce the iPhone in the United States instead of the Global South, where it can leverage low wages and inhumane working conditions, it would have to sell each phone for 30,000 instead of 900 to maintain the same level of profit. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 111

Researchers have calculated that the rate of exploitation of workers to produce the iPhone X (the 2017 model) is twenty-five times higher than that in nineteenth-century factories at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The same researchers have also highlighted another fact: if Apple were to produce the iPhone in the United States instead of the Global South, where it can leverage low wages and inhumane working conditions, it would have to sell each phone for 30,000 instead of 900 to maintain the same level of profit. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 111

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Mattei’s core argument about global competition intensifying exploitation, and pairs with the reader’s interest in tracing austerity across the Global South.
• SHARE: The 30,000 vs 900 iPhone figure is a striking, self-contained data point for anyone interested in supply-chain economics.
• QUESTION: The claim about the $30,000 figure seems to conflate labor cost with final price; worth chasing the original research and its methodology.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 111; Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 111