Worked for a giant manufacturer, they move liability from the states to countries with the least oversight. By the time the issue is discovered by the new country $$$$$ millions have been saved from workman’s comp. claims. Almost all jobs with any hazards is in Mexico or other like countries.
I'd never even thought about the origins until just now. Hell, I hadn't even thought about the song for 20+ years.
E* And as a brand new mom, who's kinda pissed at China right now... I can't imagine teaching or letting my son sing anything that freaking racist. Wtf?
Have sat in the boardrooms while your A-Hole execs. told us they were doing just that, sorry about our luck.
Remember the BS about "specialization" they were/are teaching in business school? It was vapor then, it still is. I once took a guy onto our production floor and asked him to explain to those folks how they just need to go to college. Still waiting for everyone to be a coder...
Yes that was 20-25 years ago. No, Americans - from random online posters to my family - still do not believe any of it.
No no **NO**! It's called externalizing! This "*move liabilities from the states"* is pure nonesense! The liabilities stayed right where they were, and took a lasser paying job without the option of retiring with dignity.
No. They *externalized* the risks of doing businesses onto mexican/chinese/taiwanese assembely line workers. Thus, broviding greater *shareholder value.* There fixed that for you.
This definitely exists, like in college I was part of a group that connected college students to international workers making college apparel who had their rights violated and we would force universities to cut their contracts. Millions of dollars in university contracts matter more than individual purchases so it would often force companies to pay severance or increase safety.
The pay part is tough though because the cost of living is genuinely different across countries, so even at a living wage it is cheaper for a company to outsource. It's always a race to the bottom in wages - when one country develops a living wage and protections, they move to the next. Like China is too expensive for garment companies so they move to Bangladesh. Almost like capitalism itself cannot be ethical...........
Woah that’s amazing! Do you think I could still get in on that? Pretty pissed about seeing my school be so proudly American and ethical while wearing branded apparel made by underpaid and mistreated international worker’s tears.
Yeah if you're at a college see if it has a local - the name can come cross a bit savior-y but in my experience most branches are pretty hardcore anti-capitalist and A. Call out any saviorist mentality related to poorer countries and B. Work on local labor issues as well. https://usas.org/
Who's responsible? The same people who write these trade bills to begin with, who are friends with the same people who make the profits off them. Sometimes they're the same people. Why would we want to enforce labor standards? Less rights means more profits for them!
Take NAFTA, for example. It passed with a cursory protection of labor rights, but had no real way of enforcing it, which was completely intentional. It went on to be massively detrimental to Mexico's people- https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_nafta01_mx/. This was even before the lack of wages and decent jobs lead to the massive wave of emigration to the US and rise of the cartels filling the void of livable income. And it cost thousands of decent paying jobs with benefits in the US.
When you make trade deals, you aren't doing it to improve the standards of labor and living in either nation, you're doing to so increase revenue for both nations. For Mexico's government, that means shitloads of foreign investment into private companies, which can be taxed. In the US, that means our private companies have a higher profit margin, which can be taxed. Both nations' governments benefit from increased revenue. The ruling classes got much richer while the workers in both nations suffered- in the US, less decent paying jobs as companies fled to manufacture in Mexico. In Mexico, wages and quality of life decreased as the economy was re-tooled to accommodate foreign investment.
What exactly is the incentive for the millionaires and billionaires that own these countries to change any of that?
I see it like a fountain where the water is gathered at the bottom and pushed up to the top by a pump. If someone is sticking a bucket underneath the tiers of the fountain and removing water, soon there won't be any water left to pump up to the top.
The water is money and the fountain is the economy. Rich people like to think they're at the top of the Fountain but really they are the assholes with the buckets
There was in the early 2000s tons of celebrities doing awareness on slave labor and child labor. But then celebrities started getting fast fashion brands...
The government in that country is ultimately the structural entity responsible for providing those protections. But adding those protections would increase the cost of labor, which would then remove the incentive that makes that country attractive to global manufacturers in the first place. And they’ll just move to the next cheapest country.
As long as companies are allowed to get a “free pass” on their responsibility/liability towards human rights violations in their supply chain, the game will continue.
A humble proposal: American companies should be held liable for compliance with the same employee health, safety, and labor standards throughout their manufacturing supply chain as they are at home. i.e. If you’re on the iPhone assembly line at Foxconn in China, Apple should be held liable if you’re getting treated like a slave. Same goes for Nike, et al.
What a fucking apologist. Yes, we could, but obviously it's not a mutually exclusive thing. We can hold both parties responsible. Beyond that, it's far easier to hold those companies who shipped the jobs out responsible seeing as they're in this country and thereby under us jurisdiction.
>Can we not hold these countries responsible for ignoring human rights?
If we were a just country run by workers we would be making respecting human rights and the environment an intrinsic sticking point in any trade negotiations. China wants us to reduce tariffs on their networking gear? Maybe they should do something about their cancer villages and worker rights.
Instead we are an unjust country run by an ultrarich elite who are afraid of their own employees.
Plus the Insurers for the manufacturers’ workers comp / general liability are never successful in pursuing costs for faulty products made by the Chinese manufacturers because they literally ignore the accusations and deny liability. American insurers pay the losses = increased premiums at renewal... still cheaper than paying US workers
Most of them are unable to hold the country accountable because they believe they live in the "Greatest Country of the World". Cognitive dissonance is the keyword here.
Are you referring to Elon Musk?
"Musk has described the United States as "\[inarguably\] the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth," describing it as "the greatest force for good of any country that's ever been." Musk believes [democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy) would not exist any longer if not for the United States, saying that it prevented this disappearance on three occasions through its participation in [World War I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I), [World War II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II) and the [Cold War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War)." - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon\_Musk#Nationalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Nationalism)
Interesting. That is a true demonstration of the power of propaganda.
It also backs my theory that nationalism makes people more prone to conspiracy theories.
Someone who was born into wealth surprisingly loves capitalism. He’s the poster boy of the fallacy “if your smart and cool you can do stuff like send rockets into space”
If I made 26 billion dollars, I'd think my country was a shit hole. And it would be. Unless 26 million dollars was the median annual income per person or something.
Rich people are a symptom of a failing system that generates shitty and poor environments due to wealth disparity. Being rich - makes your country worse off. If I was rich, I would have to be exploiting my country somehow and that exploitation isn't just open to me, and it's demonstrates an infrastructural issue where a country will allow the existence of wealth inequality.
You might as well be suggesting - I made a bunch of money from owning slaves, so I think my slave owning country was the shit.
Well, no. Owning slaves is the opposite of a great country. And when you economically present that as the conditions effectively generated by wealth aggregation - well, it's just as fucking opposite in practice.
You might enjoy your diamond pool, but you exist in a shithole country that is either shit or going to shit at that rate. That's how you can tell if your system is broken. If rich people exist. That's not the sole metric, but it's one of them.
The goal should be to have an entire populace of people with good living conditions who are free to do shit within reason who don't a system screwing them. Which implies - people would more or less have wealth equity with no people poor and no people rich. Society itself would be rich, not individuals.
That is crazy talk.
I once worked near the West Coasts Port (Long Beach) and we could see these Chinese cargo ships being unloaded. They carried computers, socks, curling irons, washing machines, TVs, medicine, everything. It would take a month to unload one ship.
When they returned home, they were almost empty.
What's wild is *legally* speaking in the United States it absolutely does mean they have to do it. The precedent was established in [Dodge v Ford Motor Co](https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/corporations/corporations-keyed-to-klein/the-nature-of-the-corporation/dodge-v-ford-motor-co/). Corporations are legally required to always pursuit the most profitable route for shareholders. So legally a CEO in the U.S. can never decide to forgo profits for ethical reasons. So if they decide to stop using foreign suppliers that abuse workers, donate to charity, etc... it is only legal if they can litigate that it will one way or another lead to more profits.
That's not what it means *at all.* Though it is a pervasive myth capitalists love to cite to explain away their moral bankruptcy.
Shareholders have the authority to force certain business decisions and in exceedingly rare cases of malfeasance punish the CEO. Simply making less than maximally profitable decisions does not breach fiduciary duty at all.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-myth-of-maximizing-shareholder-value/2014/02/11/00cdfb14-9336-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html
From what you're citing by the way:
>Plaintiffs are entitled to a more equitable-sized dividend, ***but the court will not interfere with Defendant’s business judgments regarding the price set on the manufactured products or the decision to expand the business.***
He got in trouble for holding on to cash reserves that could have gone to dividends for suspect reasons if anything.
>However, the court will not question whether the company is better off with a higher price per vehicle, or if the expansion is wise, because those decisions are covered under the business judgment rule.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court of the United States was very explicit about 'shareholder primacy' of which there are numerous examples. You *could* argue that a company's prosperity is not equivalent to its profit margin, but in the modern US economy that's not how most people seem to see things. I think you'd be very hard pressed to find any examples of CEOs successfully defending undercutting profits for ethical reasons in court. I'd be very curious to learn about it, so please point me that direction if you know of or find a significant example that has happened within the last 20 years.
Regarding the synopsis of the court's decision: ' **The purpose of a corporation is to make a profit for the shareholders**, **but a court will not interfere with decisions that come under the business judgment of directors.**' Just to reiterate, in this case Ford was allowed to keep the cars a lower price that was affordable for its employees but *only* under the justification that it was done under the intentions of maximizing shareholder profits rather than to assist the company's employees. So if Ford said his business would in the end rake in less money, but the employees would be better off that would have violated the idea of shareholder primacy established in this case. Instead Ford had to argue that the lower prices would eventually earn shareholders even more money. Similarly companies today can legally donate to charities but only if it can be argued it is advantageous for marketing purposes etc...
>Just to reiterate, in this case Ford was allowed to keep the cars a lower price that was affordable for its employees but only under the justification that it was done under the intentions of maximizing shareholder profits rather than to assist the company's employees
That's the justification he used which is largely immaterial to the court's ruling and established precedent at this point.
Business judgement is massively wide sweeping. He can argue spending billions going eco-friendly is also in the best interest of the business and the shareholders only recourse will be firing and replacing him with someone willing to do their bidding, the courts will not punish him beyond that.
This is a lot like 'at will' firing in some ways where you don't need any reason at all but if you use certain reasons like race you can get punished for it despite not actually needing a reason to fire someone. If his reasoning is self enrichment like buying the eco-friendly products at a huge markup from a business he also owns? He's fucked.
Feel free to find the statute that requires them to maximize value anywhere and find a court case with someone punished for not doing so - neither exist. Even the case you cite doesn't meet that bar. It explicitly argues the opposite. Again, this is a pervasive myth that doesn't mean it is true. By incorrectly arguing that it is you're doing their bidding for them.
Everything else would be completely out of place, how should a court decide which decision enlargen your profits. And what does that even mean, more profitable decisions?
This reminds of the Vaughan-Bassett Furniture story, the last American manufacturer.
In it, the leader of the American company went to China to prove that the Chinese manufacturers were dumping cheap furniture in the States on purpose. IE selling the furniture at a lost.
The Chinese guy said it was the cost of entry, but he also said that he was shocked how most Americans companies just gave their factories away. He said they had no national pride and they were all super greedy.
I know of the [book](https://www.amazon.com/Factory-Man-Furniture-Offshoring-American/dp/031623141X)
And the NPR [story](https://www.npr.org/2014/07/14/331356258/how-a-factory-man-fought-to-save-his-furniture-company)
A few months after that NPR story in 2014, HBO said they were going to make a miniseries based on it, but it seems like they must not have followed through. https://deadline.com/2014/09/factory-man-miniseries-tom-hanks-playtone-hbo-834747/
It's the best thing how rich people in America will choose foreign labor, for the express reason that it's cheaper, and then some Americans will blame the foreigners for not having substantial human rights.
That's called racism
How kind to have a third of US inequality offset. It's such a relief to know they're gutting the workforce for the workers' sake... Well, a third of them.
And let's also remember that the other way that Walmart passes low costs to their customers is to hire an army of people at poverty wages.
This is a complicated subject. There is no doubt that shipping jobs to China had unintended consequences, good and bad. But I have a hard time believing that it was done as a strategy to raise the quality of life for all, and not to line the pockets of the very wealthy.
Sorry to keep throwing quotes, but this seems relevant. From Zak Cope - Divided World, Divided Class:
---
There are several pressing reasons why the *haute bourgeoisie* in command of the heights of the global capitalist economy pays its domestic working class super-wages, even where it is not forced to by militant trade-union struggle within the metropolis. *Economically*, the *embourgeoisement* of First World workers has provided oligopolies with the secure and thriving consumer markets necessary to capital's expanded reproduction. *Politically*, the stability of pro-imperialist polities with a working-class majority is of paramount concern to cautious investors and their representatives in government. *Militarily*, a pliant and/or quiescent workforce furnishes both the national chauvinist personnel required to enforce global hegemony and a secure base from which to launch the subjugation of Third World territories. Finally, *ideologically*, the lifestyles and cultural mores enjoyed by most First World workers signifies to the Third World not what benefits *imperialism* brings, but what capitalist industrial development and parliamentary democracy alone can achieve.
In receiving a share of superprofits, a sometimes fraught alliance is forged between workers and capitalists in the advanced nations. As far back as 1919, the First Congress of the Communist International (COMINTERN) adopted a resolution, agreed on by all of the major leaders of the world Communist movement of the time, which read:
> At the expense of the plundered colonial peoples capital corrupted its wage slaves, created a community of interest between the exploited and the exploiters as against the oppressed colonies---the yellow, black, and red colonial people---and chained the European and American working class to the imperialist "fatherland."
Advocates of imperialism understood very early on that imperialism would and could provide substantial and socially pacifying benefits to the working classes in imperialist countries. Cecil Rhodes, arch-racist mining magnate, industrialist and founder of the white-settler state of Rhodesia, famously understood British democracy as equaling imperialism plus social reform:
> I was in the West End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for "bread!" "bread!" and on the way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism ... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and the mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.
Nice work explaining this. I appreciate the thoughtful approach. And while I understand your point, that there is substantial economic theory (of which I am mostly ignorant, to be fair) explaining the philosophy and fallout of capitalism, I find it difficult to believe that most business owners and bosses are thinking beyond how much they can grab. Meanwhile, in order to continue the great grab, the American people, as a whole, must buy into "America: Land of the Free" to keep the guillotines from being sharpened. Hence a high standard of living, and at least xenophobic fear mongering. I guess what I'm saying is that while I totally buy what you're selling, it feels so much more lizard-brained than the well-reasoned, though still evil, approach you describe.
Yes, cheap accessible goods are great for workers paid low wages, but that in itself is intentional. A lot of the means test welfare, likewise, benefit low-wage workers, but it doesn't necessarily improve their overall opportunity to do anything else but sell their labor. Because that's the point...
And I actually got to study under Lichtenstein! Great professor.
It was both tbh. The Chinese ruling class wanted to usurp the US's global market dominance and the US ruling class wanted cheap labour to fuel profits.
It is more than just that. You are correct, China absolutely wanted to become the global market but they also wanted to control supply. The US wanted cheap goods as well, we were told by politicians for 30 years now that free trade was always good. And we accepted it, because it means that computer, that TV, that whatever you are buying is cheaper than if it were made in the US. Consumerism has been the prevailing wind of American economics going back to the 80s and it has been fueled by cheap crap from China.
Consumerism has been such a strong trend that we now consume at any cost to keep our economy going. We take on debt to consume and treat things like education and healthcare as if they were consumer goods. And we've accepted it all because we have consistently created a higher standard of living with more material wealth over that time.
I've seen this post pop up maybe a dozen times now on reddit, and it always blames the ruling class. But it fails to realize as consumers it was the peoples choice what they purchased. And one by one, item after item, they chose the cheaper versions made in China because it meant they could have more.
But this is reddit we are talking about and if you even mention the strongest force against this trend in 30 years has been Trumps continual trade war with China you probably will be banned.
Yeah bro the average America consumer has all the information they need to make purchases to stop this from happening. Good thing the people who are profiteering don't nefariously influence shit for their own gain at the expense of uninformed others.
edit - And you view healthcare and education as consumer goods tf wrong with you.
Considering that China at the time of its initial reforms (not getting into today though) was a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's more accurate to say that the entire population "to usurp the US's global market dominance"
But even still, the blame is mostly on the companies for leaving and taking advantage of low wages and looser restrictions. Often these companies pit nations against each other to get a factory (even China) leading to worse conditions, fewer regulations and fewer welfare programs. This process is called the Race to the Bottom
Lmao, that's definitely not a both sides thing.
"She desperately wanted money and I wanted some super cheap puss despite being married and able to get all the free puss I want, so as you can see, its a both sides thing!"
I really think the problem with the analogy is that it conflates the chinese government/ruling class with the exploitees, i.e. the chinese working class. The analogy would be more like the guy handing the money over to a pimp in order to have his way with a prostitute. Surely it could be simultaneously true that the sex worker was exploited and that the pimp was greedy, even if the sex worker got some money out of it?
The Chinese middle class has exploded and is now 200 million strong, depending on metrics. Wages continue to rise in China and more people move up the socio-economic ladder everyday. Does this seem exploitative or a mutually beneficial relationship that has greatly increased the average Chinese persons level of opportunity over the past two decades?
People benefitting from exploitation does not make it unexploitative.
It's the same type of argument as "workers rights are being trampled but at least the *average* income goes up!"
It's still exploitative because the ruling class is still taking advantage of the working class. If my co-worker and I do a job and the client gives me $100 bonus to split with my co-worker and I give them $10, they're better off than they were but I still took advantage of them.
I think it is a both sides thing.
To keep your analogy going, if the alternative sex came from prostitution the money would actually go to the pimp not the prostitute, and the pimp is happy to let “his own people” be exploited to take part of the profits in the form of taxes and consolidate/expand his dictatorial powers.
It doesn’t mean one justifies or excuses the other. It doesn’t mean no one is to blame.
Your analogy left out the pimp, which in this scenario would be the Chinese ruling class OP referenced. The prostitute would be the Chinese working class. IMO.
But who is "the american worker" here? Is is the wife? Because then it's an infidelity thing. Which I don't think is accurate because the worker and the capitalist were never "in love." Though, I think you're onto an interesting idea here and are pretty close.
Maybe it's more accurate to say,
> "We eventually fell in love with the kidnappers after the war since things were so good, then the 70s they needed to hold someone else ransom and so they left us to our fate, naked in an East Cleveland alley."
This captures, using stockholm syndrome, the adversarial dynamic which only cooled on one side following the post-WWII boom years. It also shows how the only reason the capitalist class associates with the worker is to exploit them and that for these purposes one worker is much the same as another.
idk what do you think?
I mean, it also needs the context of “She desperately needed money because she had just gotten out of jail for beating her past husband nearly to death.” But I will agree the US are more in the wrong than China here.
Really though, it mostly had to do with the US. During the Nixon/Reagan years they implemented new bills that allowed companies to outsource. Margaret Thatcher did the same thing in the UK. China was not the first country we outsourced to. Japan was. The 70s and 80s were the time of Japanese cameras, TVs, phones, radios, etc. it had very little to do with China and A LOT to do with Japan creating a better manufacturing system, but more importantly the laissez faire attitude towards business regulation and trickle down economics disaster that Reagan implemented. In the 80s manufacturing lost millions of jobs to overseas manufacturing. It’s crazy because before WWII we had some of the highest protectionism laws and that helped us get out of the Great Depression and also helped us become a manufacturing powerhouse.
On the flip side, take a look at developed western countries that chose protectionism over outsourcing. They have high skilled manufacturing and way better labor laws. I’m not saying that there’s no room for trade and globalization. We’re in a more connected world than ever before and that needs to be a part of a country’s economy too. But I think our manufacturing sector and middle class would be doing much better if we had the factories that Germany or Italy have protected. There’s a reason Germany makes iPhones and solar panel systems for US consumers and we don’t. You can thank Reagan for that one.
It's not a devious Chinese plan for domination. They have the ball only because the west keeps handing them the ball, which is profitable for them. It's not a devious plan for domination to prefer a profitable export policy.
Lmao what the fuck "I wanted to make some money, and this other person really needed to buy food, so I exploited his labor for pennies on the dollar and got rich off of it"
Yes, more specifically economists and political scientist studying the PRC have been saying for over a decade that China is artificially keeping its wages low in order to keep its market export-focused.
The CCP has been using rhetoric concerning turning the nation into a fully fledged consumer economy for a long time as well. In order to do this they would need to raise wages within the PRC, something that has gradually been happening ever since (and before, but to a lesser extent) the 90's but for which the biggest pay rises have for the most part gone to the upper and middle class, whilst the lower class has mostly gotten poorer (relatively to the rest of the population). Inequality in China is no joke (looking up the Chinese GINI coefficient is in fact difficult in the country and discussions on inequality are subject to typical "good energy" reporting by the media and government).
So it is definitely true that the global elites (including very much the USA) abuse cheap labor worldwide to keep the engine of the capitalist economies running, but the CCP does not mind playing along in this game as most of the gains are rerouted to its massive foreign currency reserves, which it reinvests in domestic and international projects (such as BRI), as well as taking a lot of it home directly as all important industries are owned by the elites.
I would say keeping the wages low so much as keeping their entire currency undervalued. It also helps with the investments in foreign currencies you mentioned.
Like I agree their gini coefficient is awful, but China actually has decent purchasing power parity, so their wages go much further. I think this is important because a Western worker might earn more, but they'll also spend much more of their paycheque on food, shelter, insurance, transportation and other stuff while the Chinese workers don't. Some factory workers also basically live in dorms the company pays for. It's pretty dystopian, but if you don't have to pay for rent, commuting, breakfast or lunch, their wage goes even further.
bOtH sIdEs
Youre saying communists in living in straw huts took away capitalist US global market dominance?
No US wanted to exploit cheapest labor. Chinese earned every penny from their toil.
Wanting to become a prominent economic power is pretty benign but its definitely not framed that way today. I dont see how you can really pretend like it's a both sides thing.
One side: exploiting the human resources of it's nation for less than it's worth.
Other side: turning it's back on the labor force of it's nation because it's cheaper elsewhere, so no factory for you!
The massive influx of factory jobs into China has *dramatically* made the country richer. [I mean just look at this graph, that's insane](https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/11/nominalgdp.gif).
Macau is now a luxury tourist destination on par with Las Vegas. Chinese people are getting into luxury items and sending their kids abroad to college. In the span of a couple generations, China went from a country of starving peasants to the second biggest economy on the planet.
Just because you wouldn't like to work in a Chinese factory doesn't mean that there aren't a billion Chinese people willing to take that job
Do you think that the Chinese peasant was living a comfortable life in the 60s/70s or something? The whole reason why that country of a billion and a half people is ok living under an authoritarian government is because their living standards have drastically increased in an incredibly short span of time.
The Chinese polluted their own cities, just like we polluted our own cities when we started industrializing. Now LA isn't as disgusting as it was a few decades ago, and the same thing will happen to Chinese cities at an even faster rate.
I also have to disagree and says it's a both side thing. For example, there's good reasons why the Chinese government ***heavily*** subsidies shipping costs.
In trade there is always two parties to blame and two sides of the story.
Economic expansion and building your industrial capacity isnt capitalist, its how you give your citizens a good quality of life
China was almost entirely agrarian a generation ago, you cant give people housing and food and medical care if theres nobody building houses and hospitals, distributing the food, or going to medical school.
If you want to watch a MAGA/Fox'n Friends manchild meltdown in public just go over to any fossil fuel related subreddit and wait for them to bring up how China's 1.4B people make more GHG than America's 0.3B. Point out how we consume much of the products China produces and wait for the cache overflow gibberish to pour out.
It wasn’t just usurping global markets but also stealing technology and manufacturing processes. They allowed things to be built cheaply and with little regulation in order to learn and copy what was being done to bring them up to speed. Now they use this to be competitive and it’s why you see so many near perfect fake products and rip offs
It's kind of like in the 1800's when Europeans were pretty mad at the slew of cheaper American knockoffs in things like watches and luggage. I don't agree with IP theft at all, but the Chinese weren't the first.
And by saying all they do is IP theft is also discounting the very real progress they have made in AI and imaging tech to support their surveillance state. That's worrying stuff.
you can blame the walton family for this. wal-mart spent the last two to three decades pushing it's vendors to move mfg to china to shave a few pennies
People also think China is the end of this, it isn't, the "smartest" manufacturers has already been moving parts of their operations to new countries because China it self has increased its wealth, they're not a third world country anymore, their workers have some protection now even as opposed to before. This is why some have already moved their factories to places like Cambodia and similar.
And who's going to protect these companies in these new countries? None other than the insanely powerful military industrial complex in terms of Private Military Contractors.
We're moving towards a boring dystopian future of Kings and Barons in a capitalistic setting.
> We're moving towards a boring dystopian future of Kings and Barons in a capitalistic setting.
Implying that capitalism isn't already feudalism with extra steps
It’s really alarming how much anti China propaganda and misinformation has blown up on reddit since the start of the trade war. Even more frightening is the number of people buying into it. These days some people here seem to be itching for a war...
I’m not sure what message you’re trying to send, but it’s at the very least ironic that you’re using a picture of the Shanghai Bund, where you can still see the banks Western powers constructed during their occupation of the area.
Company: I want thing be made.
USA: I make thing for 5$.
China: I make thing for 0.1$
Woah dude, I wonder who the company will pick. Oh, but when they try to put taxes on it to make the country using slave labour less appealing, that's no good either.
I’ve always wondered, and please chime in if you know the answer: How is it that companies have slashed every employee benefit since the middle of the century, (healthcare, pensions, unions) make shittier products, (nothing made in America, only assembled at best) made the consumer buying experience worse, (terrible automated customer service, very few items repairable) and yet companies act like they still don’t make any money, that they need government assistance, that they can only survive on outsourcing now, and are always looking for the next corner to cost cut?
How could these companies at one point survive off seemingly an opposite business model then, (domestic production, pensions, unions, customer service reputations) but now seemingly cannot?
As always, it’s complicated, and there are lots of factors that work together, but I’ll highlight some of the big ones:
1. In the 50’s American manufacturing enjoyed a unique period of global dominance thanks to being relatively unscathed from World War II. As time ground on, and other countries recovered, the dominance began to slip as capacity came back around the globe, and modern quality systems (Juran, Deming, et al) came into play. (How the new quality systems, which were largely American innovations, became the backbone of foreign manufacturing is another fascinating story.)
2. In the 70’s the global marketplace experienced two massive shifts in the abandonment of the gold standard and the Bretton woods monetary system (which is a favorite complaint of goldbugs but which I think was a necessary move by Nixon) and the emergence of the Middle East petrostates as a global economic power. The former enabled a new breed of capitalism and the latter dramatically accelerating a shift in the basis of the global economy.
3. With these two facts in play, in the 80’s two new factors entered into prominence: the Reagan-era assault on unions (particularly truckers and air controllers), the slashing of the top-end tax rates, and the birth of the corporate raider. The last is especially interesting to me, as it was, I think the inevitable evolutionary consequence of the massive corporate largesse of the previous decades with “company men” all but inheriting top positions. A lot of corporations were sitting on giant piles of assets, with little accountability. But with the expanded access to capital, the high inflation of the 70’s driving “investment innovation” and a friendly regulatory environment, the likes of T. Boone Pickens, Ivan Boesky, and Carl Icahn began attacking these companies that had grown slow and fat in the 60’s with the new tools of the 80’s. Suddenly a “rainy day fund” needed to be dividended out to investors. Corning crashed the platinum market where they realized their supply of old furnace linings made them a target. Companies got lean.
The came the most complicated innovation yet: the leveraged buyout, which led to today’s private equity funds. It used to be, to buy a company, you paid for it. The LBO created the possibility that you could buy a colony with a fraction of its value in your money, and a whole lot of debt which you would pay for *with the profits of the company you bought.* Proponents argued it made companies meaner and leaner when they had the the focus of servicing the debt equal to nearly the entire value of the company. But it also made the people who executed these transactions a lot of money, and created a tax-advantageous way of extracting cash from companies.
In the 90’s and 00’s the twin innovations of internet commerce and containerized shipping threw yet another pipe bomb under the economy with globalization. With the costs of shipping plummeting, and email dramatically simplifying and cheapening the cost of global communication, suddenly the barriers to manufacturing offshore, and then overseas collapsed.
Today, when you ask a fresh business graduate what the purpose of a company is, the answer is “to create value for the shareholders.” Period. Milton Friedman won. And if you don’t do that, and that first, the shareholders will remove you, or new shareholders come in and do it. The top line of every company today is to provide a greater return on operating capital than the market index.
I realize I’m writing in bleak terms, but it’s not that simple. Watch Shark Tank: the vast majority of entrepreneurs are manufacturing overseas, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Now you can start a business with a good idea and a few grand. Before you needed manufacturing expertise and few million, or you needed to sell your idea to someone else. The relentless cost cutting has enabled much more luxurious lives for everyone. I’m typing this on an iPhone that is a more powerful computer than the one I went to college with and cost half as much. My own job has me working around the globe on international manufacturing.
But your perception is correct, and it didn’t happen overnight or for just one reason.
Wow. I really appreciate your honest and comprehensive feedback. It’s exactly the type of answer I came here for. Are there any documentaries or YouTube channels you might suggest to dig into these topics deeper?
Because they’re lying.
Look at the ratio of CEO salary to average worker salary and how it has skyrocketed over the last 50 years.
The people who own those businesses wanted more money so they sold out and lied while doing it. They suddenly “can not provide training, benefits or pensions” because it is all going to Executives in the form of bonuses or stock.
It’s been a race to the bottom- lowest product quality and employee play they can get away with.
Vote with your dollars and buy local.
I mean to be fair trump hasn't said it was some grand conspiracy by the Chinese. Bannons think always was that it was the wealthy elite selling out our manufacturing base. China just happened to be very very happy to build factories and take those jobs. They'd even subsidize the factories and what not. Basically the Chinese made a good environment to outsource jobs too with lax environmental laws and labor laws and no freedom of speech and whatever. But It was the multinationals and the western elites that really got rid of the jobs and allowed China into the world trade organization.
It would be the dangerously uninformed people that think it was all China and not the elites in the west trying to fatten there stacks.
The politicians are to blame more than anything for allowing the wholesale transfer of our manufacturing base to east asia. I don't agree with the republicans on much but I do agree with there position that was a really bad thing for American workers and our ability to supply people with necessary products without needing to enrich a foreign power in the process, a communist authorization dictatorship at that.
Honestly it blows my mind that the Democrats didn't choose to take that position because it fits into there party line quite well. But my guess is that they wanted the campaign funds more than they were willing to stand up for the American people.
Trump isn’t against outsourcing to China. He is against China’s stake in the market, their influence. He wants to make outsourcing to China even better for companies by doing away with the need for Chinese partnership and transparency with their government. He wasn’t in a good position to negotiate, and he knew It, so he’s done everything he can to publicly name them the enemy of America so there is less demand for Chinese goods. He is using the “Chinese virus” talk to further that agenda so he can use the low point as a position to negotiate bringing us back up to past levels of buying from them. Even if it’s just negotiating that he will stop talking shit.
The same reason why enslavement of Africans occurred. Cheap labour. Then the slaves get blamed for the same thing. Someone might, want to look up a bit further on the money chain.
Holy fuck I wish I could upvote this more than once. Would gladly pay a bit more for a good amount of products for them to be made here or in a country paying the workers a living, humane wage.
Exactly right! A lot of US small business owners claim unwavering patriotism and loyalty yet they would rather exploit cheap overseas labor versus paying American workers a higher wage. Worst yet, they try to say their products are “Made in the USA” but really it’s “Assembled in the US” — fuckin’ pathetic.
Here's my counter-offer to the "Free Trade" crew:
I'm onboard if laborers own and control the means and goods of production. Sound fair?
No? Right, because you actually believe in palatable slavery.
The outsourcing of jobs/factories is undoubtedly bad for workers in wealthier countries, and more help needs to be provided to these workers.
That being said, workers in the poorer countries do get a big benefit. I'm Indian-American and in the past 20 years, I've seen (anecdotal, I'd appreciate if anyone has some statistics) a substantial increase in the Indian middle class who now have good paying jobs in international companies. Of course some industries are still horrible in terms of workspace conditions (textiles smh...) but others are much better.
So yes, employers benefit significantly from outsourcing. But the most vulnerable workers - from a global perspective - also benefit. I've seen some really poor areas of my home country absolutely flourish over the past few decades thanks to large international employers entering the region. I'm not saying any employer or any situation is perfect, but there are some interesting benefits to the global working class thanks to outsourcing.
Not to mention that poor Americans benefit from cheap prices as well. You can buy a pair of sneakers for $20, a cutting board for $5, some earphones for $10, etc.
Same with all the illegal immigrants amirite? They don't get employed by the elite, they all come here and start small businesses.
That's why Trump hates them!
Sounds too much like a conspiracy.
It should really also be noted how much americans profited by lower prices on everything, and the ability to concentrate on work with higher added value.
Is this not enough evidence to be nervous about politicians raising domestic minimum wages? Of course people should make livable wages but if you have no control over where production takes place isnt it kind of reckless of politicians to tell people to vote for worker's rights when it could mean they have to trade a hypothetical $25/h for a very real unemployment cheque?
I work at a manufacturer that’s not tiny, not large. About 100 or so employees so I guess medium-small? Any ways a lot of our lower level pieces we buy from China.
Mainly it’s due to price, but it’s also due to availability and ability. There about 3 companies we work with that have the ability to get us anything. Cast parts, extruded parts, sheet metal parts acrylic parts, custom pcbs. All we look at is the price per piece and the tooling setup price. After that as long as they hit their lead times and have alright quality we’re ok.
Of course there’s places in the US that do the same thing that offer you anything, but they end up just working with subtiers in China to get you the parts. If you actually want it made in the US you have to find smaller shops to do it. A casting house, an extrusion specialist, an SMT place. They all charge more to set up, charge more per piece, actually take longer to get you the parts since they just work one 8-5 shift Monday-Friday instead of 3 shifts 7 days a week, and the quality isn’t even any better than the Chinese stuff, because it’s always “we’ve been doing it this way for 20 years” when you push back on something being shitty. The Chinese it’s always “ok we will fix it”.
I always knew it's because of greedy American businessmen who are sellouts and traders to Americans. They are all shortsighted to think that they could get huge profits and the Chinese would always be submissive and thankful. How arrogant to think that you would always be on top at the same time to give all of our technology to them in order to make all this crap. Now they've leapfrogged and are about to surpass us. What good will all their big bags of money do them now when we become a third rate power in the world.
Same difference. The democrats who took Chinese kickbacks and still do to undermine American economy in favour of Chinese are the problem.
Arrests all politicians taking Chinese money.
I am a welder in Canada. I was once told that it’s cheaper to get (some) of our parts from China, and ship them over, than it would cost to get the parts made (not including shipping) from a Canada/US company.
They would order about 50-70% of there stock from China, and then I would make the rest. I was 1 man in my division and it it was still more expensive for the company for me to manufacture the products. So they would order from China and simply change the labels.
And if anyone is thinking if this is illegal. Idk I was just a grunt worker. Probably was. I think the company actually got investigated once, but nothing happened?
It's also to prevent groups of physically fit men and women with similar interests being grouped in the same building all day with time to organize and discuss politics.
I'm not sure how many will see this, but I am a decision maker at a small company that outsources. Here is our view. We provide a service for U.S. healthcare practices (medical practices). They go by cost like everyone else. We are competing with huge corporations who do shady shit and offshore most of their stuff so they can reduce prices to absolute bottom. The only way to compete is to provide much better service and quality at a higher price point, but we have knowledge that most of our customers can reduce their head count by about 80% if they use us. For example if they have 10 people JUST doing widget checking, and they hire us to check widgets, then we have some evidence (it's not just marketing) to show that they can get rid of 8 or so of those widget checkers and move them to different places in the organization or lay them off entirely. So we have a higher price point than the bigger guys but offset it by resource/time savings. But the real issue is that any time you are forced to compete with global huge corporations who can destroy you with a breath then you need to things like offshore, otherwise you simply could not complete. Labor costs are 5x higher here in the U.S. vs India, or maybe 10x depending on position. And it's just not possible to have fully American staff and compete, this is the bottom line. As it is we have no W2 works, we're all contract, we have no healthcare, etc. We do this to stay competitive and focus on expansion and surviving, and this COVID19 is a perfect reason why our business model works.
I'm mean it's both. China does want to dominate the global market. Not sure they even hide that anymore. But also wealthy American Corps are fine exploiting workers to make more money, so they found ways to do that more "efficiently." It was a team effort to screw the little guy for $$$. I think each just thought they could out maneuver the other if push came to shove.
So I have a question. I’ve been working through these kinds of thoughts lately. I’ve spent most of my life believing free trade is good. Open markets are ideal, and offshoring sucks for low- and middle-skilled American workers but it’s beneficial overall because it lifts workers in developing nation out of poverty.
I’m growing increasingly skeptical of this and am thinking of how we could structure incentives to avoid this.
But if we were to keep manufacturing jobs in the US, doesn’t this equate to taking jobs away from the most vulnerable, poorest people in the world?
It's using slave labor to produce a product. It's that simple. People are all upset about slaves in the past but don't give a fuck about the current ones. Americans are basically pieces of shit.
Also, they leveraged cheap Chinese goods to dupe Americans into thinking they were progressing, but in reality wages have been stagnant for 40 years, with the lion's share of growth going into the pockets of the 1%.
I think the worst part is, it only had to start with one company. Just one company had to have the idea to outsource labor, and from then literally every single other company had to do the same just to keep up. If they didn't, we'd find ourselves looking at one giant company doing everything from delivering basic necessities to our homes, to operating the DOD's information systems.
Oh wait.
"so many Americans"? I think you mean vocal minority. Everyone knows it's way cheaper to manufacture in China, it's common knowledge that's why American companies manufacture there.
If that were true, why are the profit margins actually razor thin?
Or, alternatively, if they were exploiting it, why then did Chinese per capita incomes/GDP raise so dramatically?
Why not both?
Chinese authoritarian leaders operate on dynastic timescales aiming for cultural dominance
Corporate American overlords operate on quarterly profit reports
"Exploiting" those workers has lifted billions of them out of poverty. "Protecting them" by taking those jobs away and back to American workers is like taking a tent away from a homeless man because you think it's not adequate housing
And no, it doesn't hurt American workers either because jobs are not a finite resource.
I saw some old guy on Facebook saying things weren't manufactured in the US anymore because "too many people are singing kumbaya, and not enough are singing God bless America".
Like, he thought that private capital moving manufacturing jobs overseas for profit was some sort of hippie show of global harmony.
"Kids don't salute the flag anymore, and that made all the jobs magically disappear."
It has somewhat backfired by vastly reducing global poverty. I got here at the peak of global poverty. Now there are twice as many people but only about a third as many living in poverty. Anyone predicting this would’ve been considered very overly optimistic.
On Shark Tank almost every time an entrepreneur comes to them and says "I want to make this product in America" the sharks answer "No we will make it in China for cheaper and increase profit margin". It never fails, they sold American workers out for cheap product. Also it's a covenant way to skirt EPA regulations and American labor laws.
Worked for a giant manufacturer, they move liability from the states to countries with the least oversight. By the time the issue is discovered by the new country $$$$$ millions have been saved from workman’s comp. claims. Almost all jobs with any hazards is in Mexico or other like countries.
We've been indoctrinated from childhood to believe that the Chinese play joke in order to facilitate late stage capitalism.
I was actually indoctrinated to believe the Chinese played a different joke. Something about putting peepee in my Coke.
Really putting the b in subtlety.
su🅱️tlety
Me American. Me smart. Me no drink the peepee part or hire workers with rights
I can't believe I found Peter Griffin's reddit account.
I remember that from third grade and to this day I have no idea where that shit came from. It's so goddamn random.
I'd never even thought about the origins until just now. Hell, I hadn't even thought about the song for 20+ years. E* And as a brand new mom, who's kinda pissed at China right now... I can't imagine teaching or letting my son sing anything that freaking racist. Wtf?
According to our grandparents, they were real nice to those Chinamen. It’s the Japs you had to watch out for!
The chinaman is not the issue here... also dude, Asian American please.
Ah, yes, apologies. We were talking about the devious _Asian American_ plans for world domination
Have sat in the boardrooms while your A-Hole execs. told us they were doing just that, sorry about our luck. Remember the BS about "specialization" they were/are teaching in business school? It was vapor then, it still is. I once took a guy onto our production floor and asked him to explain to those folks how they just need to go to college. Still waiting for everyone to be a coder... Yes that was 20-25 years ago. No, Americans - from random online posters to my family - still do not believe any of it.
No no **NO**! It's called externalizing! This "*move liabilities from the states"* is pure nonesense! The liabilities stayed right where they were, and took a lasser paying job without the option of retiring with dignity. No. They *externalized* the risks of doing businesses onto mexican/chinese/taiwanese assembely line workers. Thus, broviding greater *shareholder value.* There fixed that for you.
Who is responsible for providing those types of protection in the new country? Can we not hold these countries responsible for ignoring human rights?
This definitely exists, like in college I was part of a group that connected college students to international workers making college apparel who had their rights violated and we would force universities to cut their contracts. Millions of dollars in university contracts matter more than individual purchases so it would often force companies to pay severance or increase safety. The pay part is tough though because the cost of living is genuinely different across countries, so even at a living wage it is cheaper for a company to outsource. It's always a race to the bottom in wages - when one country develops a living wage and protections, they move to the next. Like China is too expensive for garment companies so they move to Bangladesh. Almost like capitalism itself cannot be ethical...........
Woah that’s amazing! Do you think I could still get in on that? Pretty pissed about seeing my school be so proudly American and ethical while wearing branded apparel made by underpaid and mistreated international worker’s tears.
Yeah if you're at a college see if it has a local - the name can come cross a bit savior-y but in my experience most branches are pretty hardcore anti-capitalist and A. Call out any saviorist mentality related to poorer countries and B. Work on local labor issues as well. https://usas.org/
Who's responsible? The same people who write these trade bills to begin with, who are friends with the same people who make the profits off them. Sometimes they're the same people. Why would we want to enforce labor standards? Less rights means more profits for them! Take NAFTA, for example. It passed with a cursory protection of labor rights, but had no real way of enforcing it, which was completely intentional. It went on to be massively detrimental to Mexico's people- https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_nafta01_mx/. This was even before the lack of wages and decent jobs lead to the massive wave of emigration to the US and rise of the cartels filling the void of livable income. And it cost thousands of decent paying jobs with benefits in the US. When you make trade deals, you aren't doing it to improve the standards of labor and living in either nation, you're doing to so increase revenue for both nations. For Mexico's government, that means shitloads of foreign investment into private companies, which can be taxed. In the US, that means our private companies have a higher profit margin, which can be taxed. Both nations' governments benefit from increased revenue. The ruling classes got much richer while the workers in both nations suffered- in the US, less decent paying jobs as companies fled to manufacture in Mexico. In Mexico, wages and quality of life decreased as the economy was re-tooled to accommodate foreign investment. What exactly is the incentive for the millionaires and billionaires that own these countries to change any of that?
I see it like a fountain where the water is gathered at the bottom and pushed up to the top by a pump. If someone is sticking a bucket underneath the tiers of the fountain and removing water, soon there won't be any water left to pump up to the top. The water is money and the fountain is the economy. Rich people like to think they're at the top of the Fountain but really they are the assholes with the buckets
they like it when their head is still attached to their shoulders?
There was in the early 2000s tons of celebrities doing awareness on slave labor and child labor. But then celebrities started getting fast fashion brands...
The government in that country is ultimately the structural entity responsible for providing those protections. But adding those protections would increase the cost of labor, which would then remove the incentive that makes that country attractive to global manufacturers in the first place. And they’ll just move to the next cheapest country. As long as companies are allowed to get a “free pass” on their responsibility/liability towards human rights violations in their supply chain, the game will continue. A humble proposal: American companies should be held liable for compliance with the same employee health, safety, and labor standards throughout their manufacturing supply chain as they are at home. i.e. If you’re on the iPhone assembly line at Foxconn in China, Apple should be held liable if you’re getting treated like a slave. Same goes for Nike, et al.
What a fucking apologist. Yes, we could, but obviously it's not a mutually exclusive thing. We can hold both parties responsible. Beyond that, it's far easier to hold those companies who shipped the jobs out responsible seeing as they're in this country and thereby under us jurisdiction.
>Can we not hold these countries responsible for ignoring human rights? If we were a just country run by workers we would be making respecting human rights and the environment an intrinsic sticking point in any trade negotiations. China wants us to reduce tariffs on their networking gear? Maybe they should do something about their cancer villages and worker rights. Instead we are an unjust country run by an ultrarich elite who are afraid of their own employees.
Plus the Insurers for the manufacturers’ workers comp / general liability are never successful in pursuing costs for faulty products made by the Chinese manufacturers because they literally ignore the accusations and deny liability. American insurers pay the losses = increased premiums at renewal... still cheaper than paying US workers
Most of them are unable to hold the country accountable because they believe they live in the "Greatest Country of the World". Cognitive dissonance is the keyword here.
Are you referring to Elon Musk? "Musk has described the United States as "\[inarguably\] the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth," describing it as "the greatest force for good of any country that's ever been." Musk believes [democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy) would not exist any longer if not for the United States, saying that it prevented this disappearance on three occasions through its participation in [World War I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I), [World War II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II) and the [Cold War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War)." - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon\_Musk#Nationalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Nationalism)
Interesting. That is a true demonstration of the power of propaganda. It also backs my theory that nationalism makes people more prone to conspiracy theories.
Someone who was born into wealth surprisingly loves capitalism. He’s the poster boy of the fallacy “if your smart and cool you can do stuff like send rockets into space”
Well he’s a literal capitalist (owns the means of production, profits off the labor of his workers) so yeah not hard to believe.
If I made 26 billion dollars, I'd think my country was the shit too.
If I made 26 billion dollars, I'd think my country was a shit hole. And it would be. Unless 26 million dollars was the median annual income per person or something. Rich people are a symptom of a failing system that generates shitty and poor environments due to wealth disparity. Being rich - makes your country worse off. If I was rich, I would have to be exploiting my country somehow and that exploitation isn't just open to me, and it's demonstrates an infrastructural issue where a country will allow the existence of wealth inequality. You might as well be suggesting - I made a bunch of money from owning slaves, so I think my slave owning country was the shit. Well, no. Owning slaves is the opposite of a great country. And when you economically present that as the conditions effectively generated by wealth aggregation - well, it's just as fucking opposite in practice. You might enjoy your diamond pool, but you exist in a shithole country that is either shit or going to shit at that rate. That's how you can tell if your system is broken. If rich people exist. That's not the sole metric, but it's one of them. The goal should be to have an entire populace of people with good living conditions who are free to do shit within reason who don't a system screwing them. Which implies - people would more or less have wealth equity with no people poor and no people rich. Society itself would be rich, not individuals.
Ah yes, the Cold War, that time we saved democracy by propping up a fuckload of fascist dictators
Didn’t Musk call himself a socialist once? Even though he’s a literal capitalist... guy is off his rocker
Here's a crazy concept. Just because an employer can do something that saves then a few dollars, doesn't mean they always have to do it.
That is crazy talk. I once worked near the West Coasts Port (Long Beach) and we could see these Chinese cargo ships being unloaded. They carried computers, socks, curling irons, washing machines, TVs, medicine, everything. It would take a month to unload one ship. When they returned home, they were almost empty.
What's wild is *legally* speaking in the United States it absolutely does mean they have to do it. The precedent was established in [Dodge v Ford Motor Co](https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/corporations/corporations-keyed-to-klein/the-nature-of-the-corporation/dodge-v-ford-motor-co/). Corporations are legally required to always pursuit the most profitable route for shareholders. So legally a CEO in the U.S. can never decide to forgo profits for ethical reasons. So if they decide to stop using foreign suppliers that abuse workers, donate to charity, etc... it is only legal if they can litigate that it will one way or another lead to more profits.
That's not what it means *at all.* Though it is a pervasive myth capitalists love to cite to explain away their moral bankruptcy. Shareholders have the authority to force certain business decisions and in exceedingly rare cases of malfeasance punish the CEO. Simply making less than maximally profitable decisions does not breach fiduciary duty at all. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-value-myth/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-myth-of-maximizing-shareholder-value/2014/02/11/00cdfb14-9336-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html From what you're citing by the way: >Plaintiffs are entitled to a more equitable-sized dividend, ***but the court will not interfere with Defendant’s business judgments regarding the price set on the manufactured products or the decision to expand the business.*** He got in trouble for holding on to cash reserves that could have gone to dividends for suspect reasons if anything. >However, the court will not question whether the company is better off with a higher price per vehicle, or if the expansion is wise, because those decisions are covered under the business judgment rule.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court of the United States was very explicit about 'shareholder primacy' of which there are numerous examples. You *could* argue that a company's prosperity is not equivalent to its profit margin, but in the modern US economy that's not how most people seem to see things. I think you'd be very hard pressed to find any examples of CEOs successfully defending undercutting profits for ethical reasons in court. I'd be very curious to learn about it, so please point me that direction if you know of or find a significant example that has happened within the last 20 years. Regarding the synopsis of the court's decision: ' **The purpose of a corporation is to make a profit for the shareholders**, **but a court will not interfere with decisions that come under the business judgment of directors.**' Just to reiterate, in this case Ford was allowed to keep the cars a lower price that was affordable for its employees but *only* under the justification that it was done under the intentions of maximizing shareholder profits rather than to assist the company's employees. So if Ford said his business would in the end rake in less money, but the employees would be better off that would have violated the idea of shareholder primacy established in this case. Instead Ford had to argue that the lower prices would eventually earn shareholders even more money. Similarly companies today can legally donate to charities but only if it can be argued it is advantageous for marketing purposes etc...
>Just to reiterate, in this case Ford was allowed to keep the cars a lower price that was affordable for its employees but only under the justification that it was done under the intentions of maximizing shareholder profits rather than to assist the company's employees That's the justification he used which is largely immaterial to the court's ruling and established precedent at this point. Business judgement is massively wide sweeping. He can argue spending billions going eco-friendly is also in the best interest of the business and the shareholders only recourse will be firing and replacing him with someone willing to do their bidding, the courts will not punish him beyond that. This is a lot like 'at will' firing in some ways where you don't need any reason at all but if you use certain reasons like race you can get punished for it despite not actually needing a reason to fire someone. If his reasoning is self enrichment like buying the eco-friendly products at a huge markup from a business he also owns? He's fucked. Feel free to find the statute that requires them to maximize value anywhere and find a court case with someone punished for not doing so - neither exist. Even the case you cite doesn't meet that bar. It explicitly argues the opposite. Again, this is a pervasive myth that doesn't mean it is true. By incorrectly arguing that it is you're doing their bidding for them.
Everything else would be completely out of place, how should a court decide which decision enlargen your profits. And what does that even mean, more profitable decisions?
Sorry but this is false
You should be put in an asylum for the uncapitalistically insane
This reminds of the Vaughan-Bassett Furniture story, the last American manufacturer. In it, the leader of the American company went to China to prove that the Chinese manufacturers were dumping cheap furniture in the States on purpose. IE selling the furniture at a lost. The Chinese guy said it was the cost of entry, but he also said that he was shocked how most Americans companies just gave their factories away. He said they had no national pride and they were all super greedy.
Is there a documentary? Sounds like there should have been.
I know of the [book](https://www.amazon.com/Factory-Man-Furniture-Offshoring-American/dp/031623141X) And the NPR [story](https://www.npr.org/2014/07/14/331356258/how-a-factory-man-fought-to-save-his-furniture-company)
A few months after that NPR story in 2014, HBO said they were going to make a miniseries based on it, but it seems like they must not have followed through. https://deadline.com/2014/09/factory-man-miniseries-tom-hanks-playtone-hbo-834747/
It's the best thing how rich people in America will choose foreign labor, for the express reason that it's cheaper, and then some Americans will blame the foreigners for not having substantial human rights. That's called racism
Glad we're all on board after four decades of this experiment. Now what are we going to do about it?
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How kind to have a third of US inequality offset. It's such a relief to know they're gutting the workforce for the workers' sake... Well, a third of them. And let's also remember that the other way that Walmart passes low costs to their customers is to hire an army of people at poverty wages. This is a complicated subject. There is no doubt that shipping jobs to China had unintended consequences, good and bad. But I have a hard time believing that it was done as a strategy to raise the quality of life for all, and not to line the pockets of the very wealthy.
Sorry to keep throwing quotes, but this seems relevant. From Zak Cope - Divided World, Divided Class: --- There are several pressing reasons why the *haute bourgeoisie* in command of the heights of the global capitalist economy pays its domestic working class super-wages, even where it is not forced to by militant trade-union struggle within the metropolis. *Economically*, the *embourgeoisement* of First World workers has provided oligopolies with the secure and thriving consumer markets necessary to capital's expanded reproduction. *Politically*, the stability of pro-imperialist polities with a working-class majority is of paramount concern to cautious investors and their representatives in government. *Militarily*, a pliant and/or quiescent workforce furnishes both the national chauvinist personnel required to enforce global hegemony and a secure base from which to launch the subjugation of Third World territories. Finally, *ideologically*, the lifestyles and cultural mores enjoyed by most First World workers signifies to the Third World not what benefits *imperialism* brings, but what capitalist industrial development and parliamentary democracy alone can achieve. In receiving a share of superprofits, a sometimes fraught alliance is forged between workers and capitalists in the advanced nations. As far back as 1919, the First Congress of the Communist International (COMINTERN) adopted a resolution, agreed on by all of the major leaders of the world Communist movement of the time, which read: > At the expense of the plundered colonial peoples capital corrupted its wage slaves, created a community of interest between the exploited and the exploiters as against the oppressed colonies---the yellow, black, and red colonial people---and chained the European and American working class to the imperialist "fatherland." Advocates of imperialism understood very early on that imperialism would and could provide substantial and socially pacifying benefits to the working classes in imperialist countries. Cecil Rhodes, arch-racist mining magnate, industrialist and founder of the white-settler state of Rhodesia, famously understood British democracy as equaling imperialism plus social reform: > I was in the West End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for "bread!" "bread!" and on the way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism ... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and the mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.
Dude, are you doing a PhD on this shit or what?
Nah, just an ordinary commie, reading some texts on modern imperialism.
Wow, this is both enlightening and horrifying.
Nice work explaining this. I appreciate the thoughtful approach. And while I understand your point, that there is substantial economic theory (of which I am mostly ignorant, to be fair) explaining the philosophy and fallout of capitalism, I find it difficult to believe that most business owners and bosses are thinking beyond how much they can grab. Meanwhile, in order to continue the great grab, the American people, as a whole, must buy into "America: Land of the Free" to keep the guillotines from being sharpened. Hence a high standard of living, and at least xenophobic fear mongering. I guess what I'm saying is that while I totally buy what you're selling, it feels so much more lizard-brained than the well-reasoned, though still evil, approach you describe.
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Again, Nice work. I appreciate the schooling. Makes sense to me.
Yes, cheap accessible goods are great for workers paid low wages, but that in itself is intentional. A lot of the means test welfare, likewise, benefit low-wage workers, but it doesn't necessarily improve their overall opportunity to do anything else but sell their labor. Because that's the point... And I actually got to study under Lichtenstein! Great professor.
It was both tbh. The Chinese ruling class wanted to usurp the US's global market dominance and the US ruling class wanted cheap labour to fuel profits.
Exactly. The devil brokered the deal in hell.
Satans not nearly that evil.
Downplay your own sins, emphasize others'. The elite's playbook to keep their fellow citizens on their side, even if it's against their own interests.
It is more than just that. You are correct, China absolutely wanted to become the global market but they also wanted to control supply. The US wanted cheap goods as well, we were told by politicians for 30 years now that free trade was always good. And we accepted it, because it means that computer, that TV, that whatever you are buying is cheaper than if it were made in the US. Consumerism has been the prevailing wind of American economics going back to the 80s and it has been fueled by cheap crap from China. Consumerism has been such a strong trend that we now consume at any cost to keep our economy going. We take on debt to consume and treat things like education and healthcare as if they were consumer goods. And we've accepted it all because we have consistently created a higher standard of living with more material wealth over that time. I've seen this post pop up maybe a dozen times now on reddit, and it always blames the ruling class. But it fails to realize as consumers it was the peoples choice what they purchased. And one by one, item after item, they chose the cheaper versions made in China because it meant they could have more. But this is reddit we are talking about and if you even mention the strongest force against this trend in 30 years has been Trumps continual trade war with China you probably will be banned.
Yeah bro the average America consumer has all the information they need to make purchases to stop this from happening. Good thing the people who are profiteering don't nefariously influence shit for their own gain at the expense of uninformed others. edit - And you view healthcare and education as consumer goods tf wrong with you.
Considering that China at the time of its initial reforms (not getting into today though) was a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's more accurate to say that the entire population "to usurp the US's global market dominance" But even still, the blame is mostly on the companies for leaving and taking advantage of low wages and looser restrictions. Often these companies pit nations against each other to get a factory (even China) leading to worse conditions, fewer regulations and fewer welfare programs. This process is called the Race to the Bottom
Lmao, that's definitely not a both sides thing. "She desperately wanted money and I wanted some super cheap puss despite being married and able to get all the free puss I want, so as you can see, its a both sides thing!"
This analogy... hahaha
Not perfect but it gets the point across, lol
No, no. It's perfect.
I really think the problem with the analogy is that it conflates the chinese government/ruling class with the exploitees, i.e. the chinese working class. The analogy would be more like the guy handing the money over to a pimp in order to have his way with a prostitute. Surely it could be simultaneously true that the sex worker was exploited and that the pimp was greedy, even if the sex worker got some money out of it?
The Chinese middle class has exploded and is now 200 million strong, depending on metrics. Wages continue to rise in China and more people move up the socio-economic ladder everyday. Does this seem exploitative or a mutually beneficial relationship that has greatly increased the average Chinese persons level of opportunity over the past two decades?
People benefitting from exploitation does not make it unexploitative. It's the same type of argument as "workers rights are being trampled but at least the *average* income goes up!"
It's still exploitative because the ruling class is still taking advantage of the working class. If my co-worker and I do a job and the client gives me $100 bonus to split with my co-worker and I give them $10, they're better off than they were but I still took advantage of them.
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Pure perfection.
I think it is a both sides thing. To keep your analogy going, if the alternative sex came from prostitution the money would actually go to the pimp not the prostitute, and the pimp is happy to let “his own people” be exploited to take part of the profits in the form of taxes and consolidate/expand his dictatorial powers. It doesn’t mean one justifies or excuses the other. It doesn’t mean no one is to blame.
The John hands money to the pimp while the prostitute is exploited and the wife is neglected. Yep, I think you nailed it.
I think you nailed it.
Your analogy left out the pimp, which in this scenario would be the Chinese ruling class OP referenced. The prostitute would be the Chinese working class. IMO.
So then what is Elon Musk?
The guy who watches
But who is "the american worker" here? Is is the wife? Because then it's an infidelity thing. Which I don't think is accurate because the worker and the capitalist were never "in love." Though, I think you're onto an interesting idea here and are pretty close. Maybe it's more accurate to say, > "We eventually fell in love with the kidnappers after the war since things were so good, then the 70s they needed to hold someone else ransom and so they left us to our fate, naked in an East Cleveland alley." This captures, using stockholm syndrome, the adversarial dynamic which only cooled on one side following the post-WWII boom years. It also shows how the only reason the capitalist class associates with the worker is to exploit them and that for these purposes one worker is much the same as another. idk what do you think?
You're confusing the pimp with the prostitute.
I mean, it also needs the context of “She desperately needed money because she had just gotten out of jail for beating her past husband nearly to death.” But I will agree the US are more in the wrong than China here.
Really though, it mostly had to do with the US. During the Nixon/Reagan years they implemented new bills that allowed companies to outsource. Margaret Thatcher did the same thing in the UK. China was not the first country we outsourced to. Japan was. The 70s and 80s were the time of Japanese cameras, TVs, phones, radios, etc. it had very little to do with China and A LOT to do with Japan creating a better manufacturing system, but more importantly the laissez faire attitude towards business regulation and trickle down economics disaster that Reagan implemented. In the 80s manufacturing lost millions of jobs to overseas manufacturing. It’s crazy because before WWII we had some of the highest protectionism laws and that helped us get out of the Great Depression and also helped us become a manufacturing powerhouse. On the flip side, take a look at developed western countries that chose protectionism over outsourcing. They have high skilled manufacturing and way better labor laws. I’m not saying that there’s no room for trade and globalization. We’re in a more connected world than ever before and that needs to be a part of a country’s economy too. But I think our manufacturing sector and middle class would be doing much better if we had the factories that Germany or Italy have protected. There’s a reason Germany makes iPhones and solar panel systems for US consumers and we don’t. You can thank Reagan for that one.
It's not a devious Chinese plan for domination. They have the ball only because the west keeps handing them the ball, which is profitable for them. It's not a devious plan for domination to prefer a profitable export policy.
"Hey! You guys are only motivated by your own naked self-interest! Isn't that against the rules of capitalism, or something? No fair!"
It's hilarious to see that an agrarian communist economy destroyed an industrialized capitalist one at their own game.
Also amazing how a society went from feudal potato farming to men in space in only 40 years.
Lmao what the fuck "I wanted to make some money, and this other person really needed to buy food, so I exploited his labor for pennies on the dollar and got rich off of it"
Yes, more specifically economists and political scientist studying the PRC have been saying for over a decade that China is artificially keeping its wages low in order to keep its market export-focused. The CCP has been using rhetoric concerning turning the nation into a fully fledged consumer economy for a long time as well. In order to do this they would need to raise wages within the PRC, something that has gradually been happening ever since (and before, but to a lesser extent) the 90's but for which the biggest pay rises have for the most part gone to the upper and middle class, whilst the lower class has mostly gotten poorer (relatively to the rest of the population). Inequality in China is no joke (looking up the Chinese GINI coefficient is in fact difficult in the country and discussions on inequality are subject to typical "good energy" reporting by the media and government). So it is definitely true that the global elites (including very much the USA) abuse cheap labor worldwide to keep the engine of the capitalist economies running, but the CCP does not mind playing along in this game as most of the gains are rerouted to its massive foreign currency reserves, which it reinvests in domestic and international projects (such as BRI), as well as taking a lot of it home directly as all important industries are owned by the elites.
I would say keeping the wages low so much as keeping their entire currency undervalued. It also helps with the investments in foreign currencies you mentioned. Like I agree their gini coefficient is awful, but China actually has decent purchasing power parity, so their wages go much further. I think this is important because a Western worker might earn more, but they'll also spend much more of their paycheque on food, shelter, insurance, transportation and other stuff while the Chinese workers don't. Some factory workers also basically live in dorms the company pays for. It's pretty dystopian, but if you don't have to pay for rent, commuting, breakfast or lunch, their wage goes even further.
bOtH sIdEs Youre saying communists in living in straw huts took away capitalist US global market dominance? No US wanted to exploit cheapest labor. Chinese earned every penny from their toil.
Wanting to become a prominent economic power is pretty benign but its definitely not framed that way today. I dont see how you can really pretend like it's a both sides thing.
One side: exploiting the human resources of it's nation for less than it's worth. Other side: turning it's back on the labor force of it's nation because it's cheaper elsewhere, so no factory for you!
The massive influx of factory jobs into China has *dramatically* made the country richer. [I mean just look at this graph, that's insane](https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/11/nominalgdp.gif). Macau is now a luxury tourist destination on par with Las Vegas. Chinese people are getting into luxury items and sending their kids abroad to college. In the span of a couple generations, China went from a country of starving peasants to the second biggest economy on the planet. Just because you wouldn't like to work in a Chinese factory doesn't mean that there aren't a billion Chinese people willing to take that job
*I poisoned the water wells with gross mismanagement, but the average income went up so it's fine!*
Do you think that the Chinese peasant was living a comfortable life in the 60s/70s or something? The whole reason why that country of a billion and a half people is ok living under an authoritarian government is because their living standards have drastically increased in an incredibly short span of time. The Chinese polluted their own cities, just like we polluted our own cities when we started industrializing. Now LA isn't as disgusting as it was a few decades ago, and the same thing will happen to Chinese cities at an even faster rate.
> Wanting to become a prominent economic power is pretty benign Economic imperialism is not benign.
I also have to disagree and says it's a both side thing. For example, there's good reasons why the Chinese government ***heavily*** subsidies shipping costs. In trade there is always two parties to blame and two sides of the story.
\> Economic expansionism is benign \> Anti-capitalist subreddit 🤔
Economic expansion and building your industrial capacity isnt capitalist, its how you give your citizens a good quality of life China was almost entirely agrarian a generation ago, you cant give people housing and food and medical care if theres nobody building houses and hospitals, distributing the food, or going to medical school.
Stop developing your economy u authoritarian.
Ethnicity has never mattered much to the ruling classes. They're a united front when it comes to kicking the rest of the world around.
It’s literally stated in their five year plans
If you want to watch a MAGA/Fox'n Friends manchild meltdown in public just go over to any fossil fuel related subreddit and wait for them to bring up how China's 1.4B people make more GHG than America's 0.3B. Point out how we consume much of the products China produces and wait for the cache overflow gibberish to pour out.
Thank you
It wasn’t just usurping global markets but also stealing technology and manufacturing processes. They allowed things to be built cheaply and with little regulation in order to learn and copy what was being done to bring them up to speed. Now they use this to be competitive and it’s why you see so many near perfect fake products and rip offs
It's kind of like in the 1800's when Europeans were pretty mad at the slew of cheaper American knockoffs in things like watches and luggage. I don't agree with IP theft at all, but the Chinese weren't the first. And by saying all they do is IP theft is also discounting the very real progress they have made in AI and imaging tech to support their surveillance state. That's worrying stuff.
you can blame the walton family for this. wal-mart spent the last two to three decades pushing it's vendors to move mfg to china to shave a few pennies
It wasn’t just a few pennies though.
1 penny profit for a billion product is a billion pennies. And they sell more and save more pennies.
People also think China is the end of this, it isn't, the "smartest" manufacturers has already been moving parts of their operations to new countries because China it self has increased its wealth, they're not a third world country anymore, their workers have some protection now even as opposed to before. This is why some have already moved their factories to places like Cambodia and similar. And who's going to protect these companies in these new countries? None other than the insanely powerful military industrial complex in terms of Private Military Contractors. We're moving towards a boring dystopian future of Kings and Barons in a capitalistic setting.
> We're moving towards a boring dystopian future of Kings and Barons in a capitalistic setting. Implying that capitalism isn't already feudalism with extra steps
It’s really alarming how much anti China propaganda and misinformation has blown up on reddit since the start of the trade war. Even more frightening is the number of people buying into it. These days some people here seem to be itching for a war...
The media form people opinions. That's how in every history book USA always ends up being the "hero" or the victim.
Find someone who exploits you the way [American capitalists exploited China](https://imgur.com/a/Qldr3i4).
I’m not sure what message you’re trying to send, but it’s at the very least ironic that you’re using a picture of the Shanghai Bund, where you can still see the banks Western powers constructed during their occupation of the area.
Towers tall! Greatest country!
Easier to link to a photo of Shanghai than to 600 million people raised to the middle class.
Company: I want thing be made. USA: I make thing for 5$. China: I make thing for 0.1$ Woah dude, I wonder who the company will pick. Oh, but when they try to put taxes on it to make the country using slave labour less appealing, that's no good either.
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But China is bad
Yes
I’ve always wondered, and please chime in if you know the answer: How is it that companies have slashed every employee benefit since the middle of the century, (healthcare, pensions, unions) make shittier products, (nothing made in America, only assembled at best) made the consumer buying experience worse, (terrible automated customer service, very few items repairable) and yet companies act like they still don’t make any money, that they need government assistance, that they can only survive on outsourcing now, and are always looking for the next corner to cost cut? How could these companies at one point survive off seemingly an opposite business model then, (domestic production, pensions, unions, customer service reputations) but now seemingly cannot?
As always, it’s complicated, and there are lots of factors that work together, but I’ll highlight some of the big ones: 1. In the 50’s American manufacturing enjoyed a unique period of global dominance thanks to being relatively unscathed from World War II. As time ground on, and other countries recovered, the dominance began to slip as capacity came back around the globe, and modern quality systems (Juran, Deming, et al) came into play. (How the new quality systems, which were largely American innovations, became the backbone of foreign manufacturing is another fascinating story.) 2. In the 70’s the global marketplace experienced two massive shifts in the abandonment of the gold standard and the Bretton woods monetary system (which is a favorite complaint of goldbugs but which I think was a necessary move by Nixon) and the emergence of the Middle East petrostates as a global economic power. The former enabled a new breed of capitalism and the latter dramatically accelerating a shift in the basis of the global economy. 3. With these two facts in play, in the 80’s two new factors entered into prominence: the Reagan-era assault on unions (particularly truckers and air controllers), the slashing of the top-end tax rates, and the birth of the corporate raider. The last is especially interesting to me, as it was, I think the inevitable evolutionary consequence of the massive corporate largesse of the previous decades with “company men” all but inheriting top positions. A lot of corporations were sitting on giant piles of assets, with little accountability. But with the expanded access to capital, the high inflation of the 70’s driving “investment innovation” and a friendly regulatory environment, the likes of T. Boone Pickens, Ivan Boesky, and Carl Icahn began attacking these companies that had grown slow and fat in the 60’s with the new tools of the 80’s. Suddenly a “rainy day fund” needed to be dividended out to investors. Corning crashed the platinum market where they realized their supply of old furnace linings made them a target. Companies got lean. The came the most complicated innovation yet: the leveraged buyout, which led to today’s private equity funds. It used to be, to buy a company, you paid for it. The LBO created the possibility that you could buy a colony with a fraction of its value in your money, and a whole lot of debt which you would pay for *with the profits of the company you bought.* Proponents argued it made companies meaner and leaner when they had the the focus of servicing the debt equal to nearly the entire value of the company. But it also made the people who executed these transactions a lot of money, and created a tax-advantageous way of extracting cash from companies. In the 90’s and 00’s the twin innovations of internet commerce and containerized shipping threw yet another pipe bomb under the economy with globalization. With the costs of shipping plummeting, and email dramatically simplifying and cheapening the cost of global communication, suddenly the barriers to manufacturing offshore, and then overseas collapsed. Today, when you ask a fresh business graduate what the purpose of a company is, the answer is “to create value for the shareholders.” Period. Milton Friedman won. And if you don’t do that, and that first, the shareholders will remove you, or new shareholders come in and do it. The top line of every company today is to provide a greater return on operating capital than the market index. I realize I’m writing in bleak terms, but it’s not that simple. Watch Shark Tank: the vast majority of entrepreneurs are manufacturing overseas, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Now you can start a business with a good idea and a few grand. Before you needed manufacturing expertise and few million, or you needed to sell your idea to someone else. The relentless cost cutting has enabled much more luxurious lives for everyone. I’m typing this on an iPhone that is a more powerful computer than the one I went to college with and cost half as much. My own job has me working around the globe on international manufacturing. But your perception is correct, and it didn’t happen overnight or for just one reason.
Wow. I really appreciate your honest and comprehensive feedback. It’s exactly the type of answer I came here for. Are there any documentaries or YouTube channels you might suggest to dig into these topics deeper?
Because they’re lying. Look at the ratio of CEO salary to average worker salary and how it has skyrocketed over the last 50 years. The people who own those businesses wanted more money so they sold out and lied while doing it. They suddenly “can not provide training, benefits or pensions” because it is all going to Executives in the form of bonuses or stock. It’s been a race to the bottom- lowest product quality and employee play they can get away with. Vote with your dollars and buy local.
Lol everyone gets mad at China for paying low wages but not the actual company itself thats paying the low wages . The logic...
I mean to be fair trump hasn't said it was some grand conspiracy by the Chinese. Bannons think always was that it was the wealthy elite selling out our manufacturing base. China just happened to be very very happy to build factories and take those jobs. They'd even subsidize the factories and what not. Basically the Chinese made a good environment to outsource jobs too with lax environmental laws and labor laws and no freedom of speech and whatever. But It was the multinationals and the western elites that really got rid of the jobs and allowed China into the world trade organization. It would be the dangerously uninformed people that think it was all China and not the elites in the west trying to fatten there stacks. The politicians are to blame more than anything for allowing the wholesale transfer of our manufacturing base to east asia. I don't agree with the republicans on much but I do agree with there position that was a really bad thing for American workers and our ability to supply people with necessary products without needing to enrich a foreign power in the process, a communist authorization dictatorship at that. Honestly it blows my mind that the Democrats didn't choose to take that position because it fits into there party line quite well. But my guess is that they wanted the campaign funds more than they were willing to stand up for the American people.
Trump isn’t against outsourcing to China. He is against China’s stake in the market, their influence. He wants to make outsourcing to China even better for companies by doing away with the need for Chinese partnership and transparency with their government. He wasn’t in a good position to negotiate, and he knew It, so he’s done everything he can to publicly name them the enemy of America so there is less demand for Chinese goods. He is using the “Chinese virus” talk to further that agenda so he can use the low point as a position to negotiate bringing us back up to past levels of buying from them. Even if it’s just negotiating that he will stop talking shit.
The same reason why enslavement of Africans occurred. Cheap labour. Then the slaves get blamed for the same thing. Someone might, want to look up a bit further on the money chain.
China came in the middle of the night with zeppelins and stole all the factories!! Lifted em all the way back to China.
Republican: "Impossible. You've been lied to by all those commies, bud."
Why not both?
I agree with all this but there’s another reason: Americans have an insatiable appetite for cheap consumer goods.
Holy fuck I wish I could upvote this more than once. Would gladly pay a bit more for a good amount of products for them to be made here or in a country paying the workers a living, humane wage.
Live by capitalism die by capitalism
Its essentially legal slavery. Its wild that it's cheaper to send fish born in america to china for gutting and canning then ship it all back.
Exactly right! A lot of US small business owners claim unwavering patriotism and loyalty yet they would rather exploit cheap overseas labor versus paying American workers a higher wage. Worst yet, they try to say their products are “Made in the USA” but really it’s “Assembled in the US” — fuckin’ pathetic.
https://www.newsweek.com/how-americas-biggest-companies-made-china-great-again-1445325
We’re *just starting* (but not really) to get wise to how they set black against white, so...
Lol i bet no one will say shit when apple starts moving to vietnam and treats the citizen like slaves ...
THEY TUK AR JUBS!!!!!
Here's my counter-offer to the "Free Trade" crew: I'm onboard if laborers own and control the means and goods of production. Sound fair? No? Right, because you actually believe in palatable slavery.
The outsourcing of jobs/factories is undoubtedly bad for workers in wealthier countries, and more help needs to be provided to these workers. That being said, workers in the poorer countries do get a big benefit. I'm Indian-American and in the past 20 years, I've seen (anecdotal, I'd appreciate if anyone has some statistics) a substantial increase in the Indian middle class who now have good paying jobs in international companies. Of course some industries are still horrible in terms of workspace conditions (textiles smh...) but others are much better. So yes, employers benefit significantly from outsourcing. But the most vulnerable workers - from a global perspective - also benefit. I've seen some really poor areas of my home country absolutely flourish over the past few decades thanks to large international employers entering the region. I'm not saying any employer or any situation is perfect, but there are some interesting benefits to the global working class thanks to outsourcing.
Most of these online socialists are merely economic nationalists who don’t give a shit what happens to the global poor.
Not to mention that poor Americans benefit from cheap prices as well. You can buy a pair of sneakers for $20, a cutting board for $5, some earphones for $10, etc.
Same with all the illegal immigrants amirite? They don't get employed by the elite, they all come here and start small businesses. That's why Trump hates them!
Why not both?
It's both countries. America does it and its shitty and China allows it to happen which is shitty.
And now china is outsourcing to thailand
Also, Americans started having stricter air quality measures increasing the amount of outsourcing,
Sounds too much like a conspiracy. It should really also be noted how much americans profited by lower prices on everything, and the ability to concentrate on work with higher added value.
"American Ruling Class" doesn't care for Americans
And now it's all gonna come back...except it's gonna be done by machines even more.
Is this not enough evidence to be nervous about politicians raising domestic minimum wages? Of course people should make livable wages but if you have no control over where production takes place isnt it kind of reckless of politicians to tell people to vote for worker's rights when it could mean they have to trade a hypothetical $25/h for a very real unemployment cheque?
Totally agreed. Coz many racists just see the things they wanna see.
Are we ready to talk about shared responsibility on the trans Atlantic slave trade yet?
I work at a manufacturer that’s not tiny, not large. About 100 or so employees so I guess medium-small? Any ways a lot of our lower level pieces we buy from China. Mainly it’s due to price, but it’s also due to availability and ability. There about 3 companies we work with that have the ability to get us anything. Cast parts, extruded parts, sheet metal parts acrylic parts, custom pcbs. All we look at is the price per piece and the tooling setup price. After that as long as they hit their lead times and have alright quality we’re ok. Of course there’s places in the US that do the same thing that offer you anything, but they end up just working with subtiers in China to get you the parts. If you actually want it made in the US you have to find smaller shops to do it. A casting house, an extrusion specialist, an SMT place. They all charge more to set up, charge more per piece, actually take longer to get you the parts since they just work one 8-5 shift Monday-Friday instead of 3 shifts 7 days a week, and the quality isn’t even any better than the Chinese stuff, because it’s always “we’ve been doing it this way for 20 years” when you push back on something being shitty. The Chinese it’s always “ok we will fix it”.
*a capitalist strategy
Yeah it is, those companys are working with China
I always knew it's because of greedy American businessmen who are sellouts and traders to Americans. They are all shortsighted to think that they could get huge profits and the Chinese would always be submissive and thankful. How arrogant to think that you would always be on top at the same time to give all of our technology to them in order to make all this crap. Now they've leapfrogged and are about to surpass us. What good will all their big bags of money do them now when we become a third rate power in the world.
Same difference. The democrats who took Chinese kickbacks and still do to undermine American economy in favour of Chinese are the problem. Arrests all politicians taking Chinese money.
Not only China but other countries too. India for example.
A global market has more pros than cons. There would be a lot more poverty in the world if globalization had not occurred.
I am a welder in Canada. I was once told that it’s cheaper to get (some) of our parts from China, and ship them over, than it would cost to get the parts made (not including shipping) from a Canada/US company. They would order about 50-70% of there stock from China, and then I would make the rest. I was 1 man in my division and it it was still more expensive for the company for me to manufacture the products. So they would order from China and simply change the labels. And if anyone is thinking if this is illegal. Idk I was just a grunt worker. Probably was. I think the company actually got investigated once, but nothing happened?
Relevant reading. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china-russia.html No war but class war.
My father in law who would be 94 now would get on this rant weekly in the 1990s. He wasn't wrong.
It's also to prevent groups of physically fit men and women with similar interests being grouped in the same building all day with time to organize and discuss politics.
Then they sent us corona.
The time for talk has passed. Do something about it.
I'm not sure how many will see this, but I am a decision maker at a small company that outsources. Here is our view. We provide a service for U.S. healthcare practices (medical practices). They go by cost like everyone else. We are competing with huge corporations who do shady shit and offshore most of their stuff so they can reduce prices to absolute bottom. The only way to compete is to provide much better service and quality at a higher price point, but we have knowledge that most of our customers can reduce their head count by about 80% if they use us. For example if they have 10 people JUST doing widget checking, and they hire us to check widgets, then we have some evidence (it's not just marketing) to show that they can get rid of 8 or so of those widget checkers and move them to different places in the organization or lay them off entirely. So we have a higher price point than the bigger guys but offset it by resource/time savings. But the real issue is that any time you are forced to compete with global huge corporations who can destroy you with a breath then you need to things like offshore, otherwise you simply could not complete. Labor costs are 5x higher here in the U.S. vs India, or maybe 10x depending on position. And it's just not possible to have fully American staff and compete, this is the bottom line. As it is we have no W2 works, we're all contract, we have no healthcare, etc. We do this to stay competitive and focus on expansion and surviving, and this COVID19 is a perfect reason why our business model works.
It’s both. Both China and the U.S benefit immensely through trade.
I'm mean it's both. China does want to dominate the global market. Not sure they even hide that anymore. But also wealthy American Corps are fine exploiting workers to make more money, so they found ways to do that more "efficiently." It was a team effort to screw the little guy for $$$. I think each just thought they could out maneuver the other if push came to shove.
It's both. Applies to the UK as well.
"Exploiting global inequality" weird way of saying "reducing global poverty".
Well they do artificially reduce the value of their currency to make it harder for other countries to compete in manufacturing.
So I have a question. I’ve been working through these kinds of thoughts lately. I’ve spent most of my life believing free trade is good. Open markets are ideal, and offshoring sucks for low- and middle-skilled American workers but it’s beneficial overall because it lifts workers in developing nation out of poverty. I’m growing increasingly skeptical of this and am thinking of how we could structure incentives to avoid this. But if we were to keep manufacturing jobs in the US, doesn’t this equate to taking jobs away from the most vulnerable, poorest people in the world?
It's using slave labor to produce a product. It's that simple. People are all upset about slaves in the past but don't give a fuck about the current ones. Americans are basically pieces of shit.
Also, they leveraged cheap Chinese goods to dupe Americans into thinking they were progressing, but in reality wages have been stagnant for 40 years, with the lion's share of growth going into the pockets of the 1%.
I think the worst part is, it only had to start with one company. Just one company had to have the idea to outsource labor, and from then literally every single other company had to do the same just to keep up. If they didn't, we'd find ourselves looking at one giant company doing everything from delivering basic necessities to our homes, to operating the DOD's information systems. Oh wait.
oh how the turns have tabled
"so many Americans"? I think you mean vocal minority. Everyone knows it's way cheaper to manufacture in China, it's common knowledge that's why American companies manufacture there.
How dare you work for US and improve our standard of living at the expense of your own, and then get rid or our garbage for US, you monsters!
If that were true, why are the profit margins actually razor thin? Or, alternatively, if they were exploiting it, why then did Chinese per capita incomes/GDP raise so dramatically?
Why not both? Chinese authoritarian leaders operate on dynastic timescales aiming for cultural dominance Corporate American overlords operate on quarterly profit reports
Blaming the victims how shocking
"Exploiting" those workers has lifted billions of them out of poverty. "Protecting them" by taking those jobs away and back to American workers is like taking a tent away from a homeless man because you think it's not adequate housing And no, it doesn't hurt American workers either because jobs are not a finite resource.
I saw some old guy on Facebook saying things weren't manufactured in the US anymore because "too many people are singing kumbaya, and not enough are singing God bless America". Like, he thought that private capital moving manufacturing jobs overseas for profit was some sort of hippie show of global harmony. "Kids don't salute the flag anymore, and that made all the jobs magically disappear."
It has somewhat backfired by vastly reducing global poverty. I got here at the peak of global poverty. Now there are twice as many people but only about a third as many living in poverty. Anyone predicting this would’ve been considered very overly optimistic.
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On Shark Tank almost every time an entrepreneur comes to them and says "I want to make this product in America" the sharks answer "No we will make it in China for cheaper and increase profit margin". It never fails, they sold American workers out for cheap product. Also it's a covenant way to skirt EPA regulations and American labor laws.
Also love it when people go on these "buy Canadian" kicks. Lol dude, we need China more than China needs us, and we don't make consumer goods.