It's a very complex topic and clearly hits the limits of my English-skills, I won't react to every written word, just some basics, I'll try to comprehend in a understandable and effective way:
1. Wages are extremely different, especially in classical "low-wage-countries" the so-callled "globalization" created extreme differences in society and social standards
Yes, in countries like Taiwan or even China, modern mega-cities exist, they're shiny, they're new and can create a high life-quality for some people. But for the majority, this life-quality is unreachable, illusional - those are the people who actually do the work that was off-shored/outsourced from high-wage-countries.
A few numbers, they're not 100% precise but may give a basic idea about the dimensions we're talking about - workers wages per month:
Chinese workers get about 50-150$/month for over 50h/week, Nikon pays about 150$ in Thailand, a japanese worker gets about 1800$ while the minimum wage in Taiwan is just 500$, rarely over 1000$/month are paid for workers, many guest-workers (e.g. from the Philippines) work in Taiwanese fabs for minimum wages.
"Craftsmen" (people which learned their job for several years and are the backbone of "Made in Germany" production) in Germany usually get about 2500-5000$, from their perspective, even East German workers or north-American workers are cheap (Mercedes/BMW pays German workers twice as much as American workers).
2. Lower life-costs don't justify lower wages in low-labour-countries
Yes, many basic things may be cheaper (food...) while others are quite often (health care) exorbitant. But to be part of a globalized economy, they'll have to be able to participate as consumers, just like workers in the high-wages-countries do. Most low-wage-workers cannot buy the products they manufacture. Audi has 6000 employees in Hungary and only about 1200 Audis are sold in Hungary every year (an by Hungarian-standards well-paid Audi-Worker has to work decades to pay for a basic Audi!).
3. Low-wage-countries profit from investments that are created by offshoring production from high-wage-countries
No, the companies try to cut costs, the people who manufacture the production in the new fab will basically do the same work but will be paid less, therefore have less consume power to buy products, bringing even the company which tried to cut costs in the first place into trouble! The state has to pay high subventions to "seduce" foreign investors, has to pay for infrastructure and guarentee low wages and low ecological standards, a very high price! The workers, even if better paid/treated than before, are victims, too, they hardly get a chance to participate in the technological/financial development. The investors are like grasshoppers! The countries become highly dependent of them!
4. Todays world-economy is hard, you'll have to be competitive to survive
Yes, and it was always this way! But basic economic rules always apply, even if they're unconvenient!
There are two ways to make production cheaper and competetive:
a) Low-labour-manufacturing with little investments in production-technology, with low production depth, sometimes the whole production is outsourced to OEMs - the company/brand just has to design and sell the products. Everything is taken care of by the OEM, environmental and social regulations are low, subventions high. The production itself (whenever possible) is made by hand or with primitive assembly aids: robust, fast, unexpensive and easy to outsource when the conditions in the fab hit a critical point after a few years (workers become greedy and organize, government is wondering where the toxic waste has went...).
It's a very common way to deal with production today, just as for Nikon, offshoring 1000 jobs from Japan to Taiwan is only one step into this direction (Taiwanese mainboard-manufacturers already offshored nearly all their production to China - their biggest political enemy - another complex topic).
Banks/stock-markets with "modern" investment-strategies and globalization worked in favor of this short-sighted strategy, because it's short-sighted itself
Long-sighted high investments into sophisticated production technology. Complex work is done by skilled workers, "stupid" work is done by machines, which are maintained by skilled workers, too.
This is a strategy which is common with succesful companies which are independent from outside investors (banks, hedge-fonds, shareholders). It's expensive in the beginning, but pays off after some time - it's more efficient than a) and makes the company/products more unique and difficult to copy which is very important today...
It's not directly connected to quality itself, a) ensures quality to the customers demands by selection, we had Chinese/eastern European suppliers which had to throw away 90% of all parts! allows for better quality-control/management over time but this know-how is usually transferred to low-wage-fabs of the company, too. Skilled workers with a long-term relationship to the company/product/manufacturing process are crucial to technological improvement,
But even mainly high-wage-produced products can suffer from low-quality-components from low-labour-locations and the customer will never know...
You don't have to believe me, just think of the shoe-industry. People in high-wage-countries pay several billion $ a year for them but >99% of them are manufactured under primitive conditions with low-quality, which hasn't improved over decades in low-wage-countries, while the "consumer-countries" only have a few thousand employees in this sector left... This imbalance is major problem.
The opposite example is Swatch. Not just expensive products (like Omega) but also quite simple, payable products are made entirely in Switzerland (>50$/h!!!) because of the unique know-how in fine-mechanics and mechatronics, entirely manufactured in-house - the worldwide market-leader!
I'll stop here, we will see if Nikon will choose a long-sighted strategy or will go the same route as others, but it's important for all of us, we're the consumers, what we don't buy isn't produced or sold, we decide, we have to care!
