I don’t, personally; I think that excessively high levels of job instability from any cause are matter for concern. But this thread is about protectionism and, by extension, job outsourcing, so that’s the area we’ve been discussing.
In fact, there’s little doubt that mechanization/automation is responsible for much more job insecurity and decaying job quality than outsourcing is.
You don’t have to advocate ZERO job dislocation. But if you advocate any trade regulations at all with the goal of reducing worker dislocation by some non-zero amount, then to be logically consistent shouldn’t you also apply the same standard to technological innovation that does the same thing? Maybe not oppose all of it, but just a little, in the hardest hit areas, to prevent massive dislocation?
If so, how come we never hear about it? The last 20 years have seen the greatest wholesale change to our workforce distribution than we’ve seen maybe since the advent of the auto, and only a small fraction of it was due to outsourcing. The internet decimated entire industries. The personal computer wiped out the typewriter industry, the local print shop, and half the secretaries.
Let’s take two very similar examples:
Telephone Operators: Between 1960 and 1980, about 250,000 telephone operator jobs were lost due to automated switching. That’s a loss of something like 60% of all the jobs in the industry. And yet, I didn’t see marches in the street protesting the evils of automated telephone switching. And these were workers that were obviously going to have a really hard time finding equivalent work. 98% of them were female, with little education, and at the time, a much smaller job market existed for women. As I understand it, a lot of those operators never found work again - their families just absorbed the loss of income because the husband usually also worked. The loss of the second income might push a middle class family into the lower class, forcing them to sell their homes, move to cheaper places to live, and cut back on living expenses.
Call center jobs are the modern equivalent. Estimates are that perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 call center jobs will have been lost to outsourcing in 20 years, which is maybe 20% of the workforce. This is a much smaller dislocation than the one for telephone operators. And these workers have above-average educations and far more opportunities than did the ladies who lost their telephone operator jobs.
Yet, we hear gloom and doom about this, how the industry is going to be destroyed and these people need to be protected from the evil foreigners ‘taking their jobs’.
What’s the difference between these two cases? Only one: In the one case, it’s another person getting your job. It looks like power is shifting. It’s a slap in the face to see another person in another country doing a job that once was yours.
Trade protectionism isn’t based on sound economics. Its appeal is that it is a way to fight back against the ‘others’ we see as threatening us. It’s tribalism. "they’ are coming to take ‘our’ things away. We must protect ourselves.
And the reason the fear is there is because people have been fed ignorant stories about the dangers of globalism from people with axes to grind. Trade unions and manufacturer’s groups are both excellent as disseminating this kind of fear, and then paying politicians to capitalize on it.
Populism always sells, and there’s nothing more populist than promising to protect you from ‘them’.
Yes, I made essentially this same point in my most recent post immediately before yours.
While these psychological effects certainly play a role in antagonism towards outsourcing, it’s silly to pretend that that’s all there is to it.
Like I said, workers have a genuine and reasonable preference for a certain amount of job stability and long-term professional/vocational development and growth within stable jobs. You are trying to shame them into silence about this preference by accusing them of various anti-social attitudes: first selfish disregard for economic efficiency, and now xenophobic “tribalism”.
I call bullshit, again. The potential danger of excessive job and career instability, and resulting decline in workers’ quality of life in an ever-more-fluid labor market, is a real one. It can’t be just swept aside by saying nasty things about the attitudes of the people who worry about it. You’re right that outsourcing isn’t the chief source of recent increases in labor market fluidity, but that doesn’t mean it’s negligible or that there’s no valid reason to view it with some concern.
My point is that there doesn’t seem to be an equivalent antagonism to technology, even though it’s responsible for far more job displacement than outsourcing.
I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m simply saying that there’s a psychological component here: losing a job to a computer is not the same as losing a job to another human who now has the job you had, and you’re unemployed.
And if you say the problem is simply the fluid job market, period, then you need to explain why fluidity that comes from globalization is treated by many as evil, while fluidity that comes from obsolescence or technology is ignored.
This doesn’t always translate to lack of antagonism, though. According to my history books, the mill workers who lost their jobs to technology in the early Industrial Revolution were not exactly acquiescent just because they weren’t losing out to another human. Present-day organized labor has also been active against proposals to shrink workforces with automation, as in recent transit workers strikes.
That said, I’d still agree that sure, there’s a strong PR/political component to much of the current vocal opposition to outsourcing. But that doesn’t mean, as I said, that the issue isn’t genuinely important.
You will not see any concerted outrage (against outsourcing) untill we start to outsource professional jobs in a big way. For example, when lawyers get outsourced (I can see binding arbitration taking away a lot of the lawsuit business), and having litigation conducted in India (think of the savings!). When we see government employees outsourced (say the MA Registry of Motor Vehicles oursources automobile registrations to India). We can save a bundle! Now, if we could only “outsource” politicians! 
It’s too early to think this conceptually. How does one measure this? To the price level of an equivalent maker of goods in an western industrialized country? Where such country has had generations to devote to a properly capitalized infrastructure? Seriously, what is the measurement?
Which are you more concerned about: a) making better conditions for those workers in third world countries; or, b) artificially propping up prices so that the price component is taken out of the equation when a consumer chooses a product?
If it’s a) taxing the crap out of their goods (and no, this isn’t a strawman, because the cost of good reflects the capital investment to make that good) isn’t going to help. They will never be able to afford the tax base to provide decent infrastructure and social aid for their populace. The only way they can afford it is if someone gives it to them. If, for example, the US were to give them that much cash, then they might as well be a protectorate or another state, otherwise the return on investment is too intangiable to justify.
If it’s b), then it’s pure protectionism plain and simple. In the long run it’s bad for economy and it continues to put downward pressures on third world economies, keeping them that way.
Of course, I’m totally ignoring those states that force their workers into labor. I’m all for imposing North Korea type sanctions against those hellholes. But, this isn’t relevant to this discussion.
You tell me its too early to think about it conceptually, and then proceed to ask me questions on specifics? I don’t care about the specifics - I was just advocating a starting point. I haven’t fleshed it out completely as I’m not really qualified to do so (though something like having a UN recommendation on minimums would be a good start, such as 8 or 10 hr work days, 5 day work weeks, oshaa safety standards perhaps?) . It is an idea that I have heard brought up before, and I think it’s a good one that needs to be considered, and as of yet, have not heard a well-reasoned, non-hyperbolic argument against it.
How are you coming to this conclusion? Placing marginal tax rates on imports (not ‘taxing the crap’ out of said imports) won’t bankrupt a developing country. Especially when you consider that that cost gets passed on to consumers. Especially when the tax can be avoided all together by having a reasonable work week and worker protections. Lets also not forget that the multinational companies will be footing the bills for these protections, not the government. All the government needs to do is enforce them.
Now this is pure hyperbole - stating for a fact that protectionism in any way shape or form is bad and leaving it at that - ignoring the fact that these ‘protectionist’ taxes on imports can be avoided all-together in this scheme and that the intention isn’t to cripple developing countries, but to encourage them to embrace protecting their workers.
No, but any type of protectionism is a slippery slope to the point where everyone who is not in the protected class is going to scream for equal protection. What happens when everyone wants to unionize? At the very least you have high unemployment and low efficiency. At worse, you have crumbling economies with stagnant innovation and technological advancement.
Not exactly. In truly competitive markets, specialization will occur to take advantage of comparative advantage. Therefore (and please bear with me in this simplicity), if management decisions cause a layoff, the better-off companies will asorb the displaced workers (or the worker will take his skill and go to another opportunity in a different market).
If the worker is so specialized that he has no other skill, then he is limiting his value when technological (or any other type of) change comes around which renders his skill as a commodity. The worker should secure himself by being more well-rounded. There are other solutions to his dilemma than by making everyone suffer from propagating his industry.
Ok, then what is your solution? You’re arguing, then, that people deserve to have their jobs protected to some degree, just not to the point where there is an active managed economy/protectionist policy at play?
Well, my googlefu only came up with subscriber articles (of some publications of which I am a subscriber). The only free cite that I could find on point woefully describes protectionism in Latin America.
Hmm…there’s that slippery slope again.
Regardless, a vast number of google cites (even with the search terms “protectionism” “good”) relate to the perils of protectionism. However, the point I was trying to make was that the more protectionist a government is with its economy, the more it causes unemployment, higher costs, and inefficiencies. These effects eventually will no doubt lead to a collapse of the economy.
Here’s your original quote:
(emphasis added)
You put in the word “meaningful.” What do you mean by that? Focusing on this line, it looks an awful lot like communism. Your focus on “minimally-regulated,” notwithstanding, is obvious relative. While I can tolerate forms of government intervention, I wonder how much is actually needed to make one’s work meaningful.
This is what I meant. So, you want other countries to enforce a 40 hr work week for manufacturing. That’s fine, but what if it’s the country’s culture to work more than 40hrs/week? Early Indian immigrants worked 19 hrs/day. They were used to working long grueling agriculture. My dad worked like that on his farm until he moved to America. He was glad to be able to work in a warehouse out of the hot sun (still cooled, to this day mind you, by slowly rotating ceiling fans, i.e. not cool at all). Working at the factory is going to provide more for the worker than working at the farm. While $1/hr is terrible for us, it’s great for them. Why would you want to limit their hours?
Marginal tax of what? Compared to a US worker where the average wage is $15/hr. Adding this tax to a good where the labor cost is $1/hr will crush the demand for that good. It might as well be made in America once one factors in the transportation costs and the costs associated to the logistics. These costs are all bourne by the consumer.
Are you arguing that protectionism isn’t bad? If so, please open another thread. Better work conditions are a result of producers wanting to attract a better labor force. If the social conditions in the underdeveloped country do not improve, neither will its working conditions. Placing too many conditions on corporations that use third world labor will cause them to eventually pull out of that country, making that country revert back to non-industrial agricultural conditions.
So that employers don’t abuse their workers? so that employers don’t REQUIRE them to work more than 8 hrs? Just because someone was working under slave conditions before does not mean that slightly improving those slave conditions is OK. If it is acceptable to exploit someone for 20hr days now, it’ll require huge grass roots worker protests and riots to ever get it changed in the future.
Thats not how taxes work. Taxes generally work on a percentage. so you charge a 30% tax on the goods coming from a country that has no protections. The $1 good is now $1.30 - which will only get passed on to the consumer in an additional 30 cents and/or affect the business’ bottom line - both of which are the intended outcomes.
I’m saying that maybe a little bit of protectionism isn’t bad. Like I said, I’m not talking about full fledged flag waving tax-the-crap-out-of-all-imports-protectionism. I’m talking about protectionism that can be avoided by simply adhering to a few workers rights rules.
I’d just like to add the question again: Why is this either or? Why can’t there be reasonable middle ground here? Everyone arguing against these ideas, why are you so convinced that small, carrot & stick type taxes/tariffs are the tool of the devil? Especially when they’ve never even been tried before?