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.
And then CCP announced “Made in China 2025” a few years back and suddenly everyone realized they have been played like an absolute fool.
China will have a monopoly on manufacturing, and they may use it as an advantage on international politics.
This is the main reason I don’t even criticize China for compromising on their socialism a little. If you were in their situation you’d do the same.
I’m confused here. To me, it looks like China has entirely sacrificed communism in favor of commerce, and is using the power of a one-party system to keep workers lives shitty in order to dominate global manufacturing. There’s no communism at all, there’s just power and wealth being grabbed by the governing party.
Something something material conditions. China is a country which is barely held together by glue and prayers. There are lots of times when they do act socialist, for example the meme of “China Consequences” for billionaires who blatantly break the law. That shit don’t fly there.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Literally every person I’ve ever heard speak about the China manufacturing status quo knows that it exists because corporations can get their work done cheaper by outsourcing to China. The entire meme is a fraud.
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.
When using their model for extreme poverty, which is ~$8/day compared to the oft-cited $1.90/day
Doesn’t this depend entirely upon the buying power in certain countries? The value of $8 is going to have a lot of variation between India, Indonesia, China, Costa Rica, etc.
I had the number of years wrong as I was relying on my terrible memory instead of looking it up before posting, that said, not sure where you are getting your numbers from since you didn’t post any links.
According to the World Bank global poverty was cut in half in 30 years, not 20 as I posted:
For 30 years, global extreme poverty had been steadily declining, and by 2015, the global extreme-poverty rate had been cut by more than half.
That’s from this link: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty
While pre-pandemic global poverty rates had been cut by more than half since 2000,
That’s the first sentence from this article by the UN (the people you claim say poverty is increasing)
Politifact says that the claim:
“Over the last 30 years, extreme poverty has been cut in half.”
Is mostly true at this link: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/mar/23/gayle-smith/did-we-really-reduce-extreme-poverty-half-30-years/
If you look at the second graph on the wikipedia page on Extreme Poverty here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty it looks like the total number of people in poverty was around 1.6 billion around the year 2000, but by 2015 it appears to have dropped below 800 million.
So yeah, it’s obvious that there’s a lot of variations in the numbers but still looks like my initial claim was not completely without merit.
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.
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.
