It's not just America. The CCP specifically knew what American shareholders wanted and provided a cheap source of labor for foreign businesses. By depressing the Yuan the government kept prices for services low when compared to any domestic company. It was a plot started by ruthless executives looking to sacrifice anything for lower operating costs but it was recognized and abused when the Chinese government saw how to exploit it.
They also secured a stranglehold over the global rare earth element market. Whoops.
The main reason that outsourcing is cheaper is that foreign countries don't have safety or labor standards.
All the progress that unions made suddenly evaporated when we allowed employers to hire foreign companies with lower safety and labor standards.
Now, maybe we should just accept that economic competition and economic competitiveness demand including those unprotected workforces. Fine. For third-world countries, even exploitative factory jobs might be preferable to alternatives.
If we accept that that's the case, is still unjust for business owners to reap the rewards of circumventing labor and safety standards while American workers lose jobs and have their wages depressed.
Every single cent of outsourcing profit should be taxed at 100 percent, and redistributed to American workers through government programs or tax cuts for workers.
They can also pay people much less there if they're living in poverty.
It’s like to see some of that profit go to the exploited workers who make the product, though. Nets vs decent working conditions shouldn’t be debatable.
Personally I think an externality tax should be applied.
Every dollar saved by skirting quality of work standards via offshoring is taxed at 150%.
Would significantly hasten the manufacturing shift to developing world democracies since in a lot of cases the cost differential is down to the same quality of work being genuinely cheaper in those countries.
Mexico for example is beginning to absorb a lot of auto and cellphone manufacturing jobs, and early reports seem to indicate that aside from the typical corruption one can expect out of Mexico, that these are the same kind of fiscal benefit that comparable jobs used to be to rust belt families in the US.
Every single cent of outsourcing profit should be taxed at 100 percent, and redistributed to American workers through government programs or tax cuts for workers.
Bit of a hot take, but I did find myself onboard and considering your point for a second. It feels like at a certain point we'd have an issue - if businesses start to decide that the US is hostile towards them, they'll happily move their business off shores. Then can they import, worry free? Or what other miriad of ways will they squirm out of the way and change nothing or even make things somehow worse.
Governments seem to like to strongly dissuade you from doing something by making the alternative you were avoiding now more appealing. In this case, perhaps world governments enforcing/controlling the wage that those outsourced workers receive - this leaves the door open to use outsourced labor more for situations like a factory's close proximity to resources and other financial incentives, or for using specific, highly skilled labor and craftspeople internationally. But by elevating their wage paid to our own (hopefully at that point also VASTLY improved) standards, you truly support the people and reduce poverty and suffering, or the jobs come home and hopefully do the same.
Feels like the world might have to come together on this too anyways, because these companies and their incredibly expensive lawyers will always find a way to wriggle out of the noose on their necks and remorselessly rake in their cash regardless. Either plan works I suppose, should the world be united in their rejection of these practices. But we're all so divided internally, I don't see how. The EU doing their best to reign in big tech lately has been heartening.
I think what they mean is an importation tax on those externalities. The only way to skirt that would be to just stop doing business in the countries which implement it, which, now you've just handed that market to companies that won't run afowl of the law.
The actual reason is socioeconomic.
China was still agrarian and America had already shifted.
Labor was drawn from the farms and exploited.
America did this a hundred years ago and all those pesky union effort created a workplace that was harder to exploit.
Luckily they've manage to convince Americans that being exploited is an acceptable trade off just as the socioeconomic conditions in China has slowed.
Exploiters are going to exploit. Doesn't matter if it's communism or capitalism. The ones with the least social consciousness climbs to the top.
Us plebs can be easily tricked into blame an other.
I mean, I'm sure China's government isn't completely innocent in this scheme either. I'm guessing that both countries play into it, on account of both countries profiting from it.
Came to comment this. Who says it's mutually exclusive?? It's both.
Like seriously, one of the most totalitarian states in the world can't stop foreign corpos from doing so much worker exploitation?
The CCP is an active participant in trying to maintain the low working condition costs that draw in manufacturing jobs, and all but openly exploit it where that offshoring leads to Chinese made products being system critical parts of modern infrastructure.
I've got to change the long term maintenance plan for a shitton of solar sites because of how they tried using Huawei infrastructure to gather adversarial data.
No it's only America cease your investigations
Don’t know about you but our teachers presented it as a way for some Sri Lankan woman to afford to send her kids to school and give them clothes. And we get cheaper blue jeans. Win win. /s
Global poverty rates were cut in half over 20 years due to globalization, but yeah, just because westerners lost all of the low skill manufacturing jobs, it all sucks. You realize the US is still one of the biggest manufacturers on the planet but it's for higher end complex products? Not saying there aren't problems in the west, but globalization helped billions of people.
The UN disagrees. When using their model for extreme poverty, which is ~$8/day compared to the oft-cited $1.90/day, the number of people in poverty has increased over the last 4 decades to 4.2 billion. You might say, “I’m referring to the proportion of people in poverty”, which, even under this model has fallen from almost 75% to around 55%.
If so, You’d be right. Where exactly have those gains been centered, though? When excluding China, the number of people in poverty has increased, and the proportion fell less than 5% between 1982 and 2018, from 62.7% to 57.3% of the population. There’s been dozens of countries collectively representing billions of humans effected by globalization, but yet most still are in miserable poverty. It seems that it is not globalization alone that brings people out of poverty. I am not saying it has no effect, but that it is not so simple as to say that global reductions in poverty can be attributed to cavalierly to globalization.
The trick is that they constantly just redefine what poverty is to make the math look good. What used to be "I'm having a bit of trouble living" quickly turned into "I'm genuinely starving to death because I can't even buy a loaf of bread" EDIT: and as that other commenter pointed out, they do pretty much every mathematical fudge they can to hide the fact their economic model is literally murdering people for profit.
Yes, unironically.
Yep. This also plays into the narrative of global pollution. Americans outsourced their most polluting manufacturing processes over to China and then blame China for producing a lot of pollution, even though it's still less than the US per capita and China is making much bigger investments into things like solar panels and electric cars to try to remedy it.
They set it up so that American capitalists could exploit the country for all its resources. In their immortal hubris, they weren't expecting how easy it would be for that same system to be redirected to benefit their own capitalists instead.
I mean, not so much a strategy as a natural economic consequence of environmental preferences and higher labor prices in the states. The hypocrisy is having labor and environmental standards in the US that we are happy to let companies circumvent by simply doing that labor elsewhere. Like we’ve all decided it’s fine to wear clothes that involved children getting maimed in factories, as long as they are not our children. And nobody was ever forced to find an economical way to make maim free clothing in the US…or given an opportunity to…
Of course it's ok we let this happen with the meat industry...
Why not both?
I've always said, "American job should pay American wages" as in Chinese workers need to get paid in dollars and minimum wage or more also it's on the company to convert that for them.
That being said America lost ground on quality... check out China's CFMoto making a v4 motorcycle... check out a Surron... Chinese quality exceeds American manufacturing now... because they train their workers with junk y'all buy on AliExpress, Wish, and I think the new one is Temu or some shit. They can now make the quality of CFMoto and Surron.
Chinese workers need to get paid in dollars
Chinese workers trying to buy groceries in USD:
They don't even use Chinese cash, its all digital.
Nixon along with Kissinger were the ones that started this.
[Grim Reaper at a claw machine] "Augh, again!? Is Kissinger even in this thing?!?"
I hope he burns nice and crispy
But it backfired because the chinese played into it
The companies put the products in front of you, but the consumers made the decision to abandon domestically made goods.
The consumer, through their productivity being siphoned off, has seen significant stagnation in terms of their real wage compared to the standards of living enjoyed by the post-war industrialized working class. This stagnation has lead to more price conscious consumers, who by necessity shop for the cheapest product available, which is available through these outsourced companies. Walmart was the biggest example. Many people had no choice on where they could afford to shop, which allowed Walmart to gain market dominance and force out less vertically integrated and violently anti-worker competition, leaving entire communities void of meaningful choice.
To put the blame for what was a multi-decade, multi trillion dollar open secret, on the workers seems wrong to me. What choice does someone making $7.25/hr (the minimum wage since 2009…) have in where they shop? They buy what they can, as they always have.
When these companies started moving their manufacturing, a choice could be made to buy domestically. That continued lack of discernment by the consumer compounded the problem. Everyone happily shopped at the big stores, watching their local shops dry up around them. Luckily these days I think people are starting to make the choices we all should have been making this entire time, and I find sustainably made / eco, zero waste plastic free, domestic products in every category at most supermarkets. It's also very easy with online retail to avoid Chinese rubbish and buy US/UK/EU made products for everything. It's 100% possible with some intentionality, financial literacy and self control to ethically consume while not being loaded. I do it. I'm not American though, Americans need to do something about every part of their society it seems.
I get it but I hate putting responsibility on the consumer beyond having a little personal responsibility. Especially when we are at a point where it's nearly entirely unavoidable to exist ethically in the west. The next 10 items you touch will almost certainly have some exploited foreign labor involved at some point in the process either entirely or components of the item or the packaging. Probably every item you touch today.
I think it would have happened regardless
Well the responsibility is on the consumer, I know it's scary, but every person has a responsibility to make moral choices, like avoid exploitative foreign made products, buying nationally produced foods etc. Obviously it will never be 100%, but that is no reason to just shrug all responsibility in defeat. Change is slow. I manage pretty well with not much money to buy products from US/UK/EU nations, buy mostly local or ethically sourced foods. Does it mean I don't get to have some things? Maybe, but that's the choice most people seem unable to make. Luckily the market is correcting for this consumer desire for more ethical products, and my local supermarkets all have products in that vein in every category.
No, they didn't. Consumers just bought what was put on the shelves with the lower price tag. It wasn't a geopolitical decision for the common man.
