Chumby co-founder and Xbox hacker Bunnie Huang has recently returned from a trip to China, where he was arranging for manufacturing of his goods. He's written an incredible narrative of the trip called "Adventures with the Venture Communist" — a rumination on the social, political and asthetic dimensions of China's runaway, cheap-as-hell manufacturing sector.
The fully-burdened rate of a worker in China is around $1.80 it seems–this is the rate that the employer pays once all the benefits (free food, housing, medical care, day care, etc.) are factored in. At these wages, laborers are cheaper than pick-and-place machines. In the US, you typically pay between $0.05-$0.25 per component placed on a PCB with a pick and place machine in low volume (100's to 1000's). I saw several electronics lines where about ten workers are lined up on a bench, bending and stuffing resistors and transistors into a moderately complex circuit board, and hand-dipping them in a solder bath. They crank out about 100 boards per hour; each employee is stuffing about four components, so 400 components per hour at $1.80/hour is $0.0045 per component. Setup and training for the line I saw took about 2-3 hours. So even if you were to run a few hundred boards, this is a very cheap assembly method indeed, as long as you can keep good quality control over the process.
