I am frankly a little shaken up at what I saw today at the Suarez Assembly plant which builds all the wheels for one of the largest distributors of bike parts to bike shops on the east coast, JB Importers. Three people were building cheap aluminum mountain bike rear wheels made for thread on freewheels. This was not the romantic, meditative environment that Gerd Schraner describes in his book, "The Art of Wheelbuilding". Poor Latin American immigrants sat in a room assembling this one type of wheel. The fastest among them laced up one side at a time at just under a minute per side for a standard cross three wheel. This makes about two minutes per wheel for a complete lacing. The worker than takes the assembled wheel and tosses it frisbee fashion ( I am neither joking nor exagerating here) ten feet into a pile of similar wheels where the poor wheel clangs and bounces to the corner of the room. He then grabs another rim and another hub and furiously starts his next wheel slapping the crossed set of spokes across as he mechanically grabs a another nipple from a bowl and threads it in by hand. A different team of workers comes in at night and tightens and trues these wheels for the awaiting consumers.
A friend of mine who owns a bike shop informed me that he buys these same wheels from J.B Importers at $14 or $15 a finished wheel. He then sells them for $30. That makes sense, but what is shocking here is that Suarez Assembly receives $1.75 in labor for each completed wheel. The shop then splits that profit with the two teams, (lacing and truing) and himself. This translates to roughly 60 cents for the shop owner, 60 cents for the lacer and 60 cents for the truer per wheel. A lacer told me that he can lace 100 wheels a day which of course translates to $60 a day for a full day of mind numbing labor.
Now for the classic content .... Most of my bikes were assembled either in Italy or Japan before the advent of the wheelbuilding machine. I am not so naive as to believe that the principle of reducto ad absurdum created a different kind of hell in Italy as well as in Japan. I am hoping that respect for the miraculous and special nature of high end bicycles required the addition of some beeswax, thick oil or spoke prep to each spoke before assembly. I am hoping that road bike wheels demand a five minute lacing time with some soothing music and a congenial atmosphere in which to work. I am also hoping that the folks involved in this work were paid the equivalent of a living wage. I know that the march of time has degraded the value of manual labor to this current deplorable level. I am willing to accept that the Trek bicycle my three and a half year old son rides has more than its share of inhumane factory labor invested in it, but I was hoping that a classic Raleigh, 3Rensho, Colnago or Bianchi was of higher breeding. My question, of course is, did the factories that built high end bikes from the classic years have respectable work environments in which important components like wheels were created?
Garth Libre in Miami Fl. USA