SuperJail Warden wrote:
Jay wrote:
SuperJail Warden wrote:
I don't know how anyone can look at the former industrial centers of the U.S. and say that our offshoring our manufacturing was a "spectacular success". It goes to show the backgrounds of the people here. Only white collar professionals would say that cheap products from China are worth the sacrifice.
It was a negative locally in the rust belt, sure, but globally it's been pretty awesome.
It has been a disaster for the working classes of the western world.
The removal of manufacturing jobs have lead to an overall decrease in the value of labor in the west that has rippled throughout the economy. Low wage service jobs were not good replacements for the manufacturing jobs that went overseas.
Perhaps, but those people did not have a God given right to those particular jobs. It was theirs for as long as it made sense financially for the company that employed them. You want 3x the wages of someone in China? Ok, then you need 3x the productivity and quality to justify it. When they started writing work rules that purposefully slowed production and decreased efficiency they tied the noose around their own necks.
It wasn't even greed that drove it. It was global competition from places like Japan, and yes, China. Japanese automaking took advantage of automation first, and they produced a car without the myriad defects built into American made cars. If you want to blame anyone, blame the MBA's that tried to min/max every aspect of production (and still do). They are the ones that replaced steel with plastic in order to save a few pennies on shipping costs. They're the ones that set the design parameters for the engineers that called for bearings to wear out at 80,000 miles in order to force repairs. American car manufacturers realized along the way that they made more profit selling parts than they did new vehicles.
Now, none of those upper level issues are the fault of the line workers, but between the greed, laziness, and just piss poor management, the writing was on the wall as soon as any form of competition entered the market. Should the US government have stepped in and walled us off with tariffs? Why? So they could continue running their shitty companies? Then your average American consumer would be held hostage with only inferior products available. No, we're better off in the long run.