Since the 70's we have seen a slow shift of manufacturing bases leave the West to the East for purely financial purposes. I've been in business, and the reason we start or buy a business is to gain control of our financial future. If successful, we operate with efficiency, ethically and with maximising profit in our ethos.
Today, businesses are being held to higher and higher standards. There has been a shift in corporate mentality, a move to a new Environmental, Social, Corporate Governance mindset dictating how we do business today.
It's focus is on Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness, on Environmentalism and how we interact with each area is determined by a points system, an ESG Score. This score dictates who we can do business with, it tells financial and insurance institutions how we rank and if they should do business with us or not.
If we do business with a company that has a low ESG score, that will conversely lower our score too. Alienating more and more businesses that don't comply until nobody will do business with them and eventually sending them broke.
Potentially, this could lead to monopolies.
We have seen this in the audio industry, with larger corporations buying up brands that we grew up with and loved and putting them under the umbrella of one corporation.
There is fewer and fewer major audio brands that are independent, many of them now are owned by corporations. The history and the heritage of these businesses are no longer driven by individuals but by corporate interests.
These corporate interests are driven by profit and in any business, your biggest cost is labour. So it is in their best interest to reduce that cost and one way is to move manufacturing off shore to countries that have a significantly lower cost of doing business and are not tied up in Western corporatism and ESG ideologies.
But with cheaper labour rates all they are doing is kicking the can down the road. Someone has to absorb that cost along the line and the last person on that line is the worker.
There are questionable ethics when it comes to workers rights in some of these Eastern countries. One notable country in particular raises alarming red flags. One of the West's largest phone manufacturer has a factory there and it is widely reported that because of the working conditions there they had to put suicide nets around the building to stop people jumping to their death.
Further reports have revealed that the government of this country since 2014 has implemented government employees in high stress critical safety positions like high speed rail operators, and factory workers in factories owned by multi-national off shore corporations, wear head gear that monitors their thought patterns to pick up if the employee is sad, angry or likely to do something that will cause harm to their environment.
Coupled with policies that have led to the deaths of over 50 million citizens since 1957 that have disagreed with government policies.
These are the issues these workers are faced with on a daily basis all in the name of corporate profit.
When we buy our audio equipment, we don't think of these things. We are consumed by reviewers saying this is better than that, but never saying the quite part out loud.
I write this post today, as an audio lover, to bring awareness to what's happening in our industry and to all industry in a broader sense.
So all I ask, next time your looking at reviewing a system, ask, who really owns the company and where is it made.
