If you’d read the OP, you’d see that I consider automation to be a bigger threat to low skilled manufacturing jobs than offshoring is, so, your claim that I “believe that bringing manufacturing jobs back to the USA is unrealistic”, is at best less than half right. We may get manufacturing capacity back, but it is not going to bring with it jobs for low skilled factory workers.
But, if you are looking at that article, and thinking that it gives macroeconomic data and solutions, then you don’t quite understand the difference between microeconomics and macro.
I also am not sure about some of the numbers that he claimed. I would like to see some second opinion on that. For instance, land in the US is almost free? What does that mean? I am sure I could find a parcel of land in the middle of no where for chump change, but if I look at any commercial properties anywhere near a population center, it is not very close to free.
We also have some interesting supply issues. Rare earths are hardly mined in the US, and we get pretty much all of them From China. In the last some odd years, China has been decreasing the quota of RE’s to be exported, making it harder for US companies to produce high tech manufacturing in large quantities. This doesn’t matter for making auto glass, but most electronics and other manufacturing these days need a steady supply.
Yes and no. I did inexpertly use the word quota as something that is a continuing practice. You are correct in that they no longer have a “quota” for export.
They still do, however, completely control the US RE market. (and pretty much the global one as well.)
Technically, you are correct, they are no longer allowed, according to the WTO, to put quotas in place for export. This does not mean that the production of RE’s in China are up for grabs for the US.
And it’s not like it is doing us any favors.
So, on topic, maybe we get all those coal miners to go mine for RE’s?
Um, your cite says that instead of building a new plant in Mexico, Ford is going to transfer some production of the Ford Focus to their existing plant in Hermosillo, which last time I checked was still in Mexico.
Not to mention the fact we need about 100,000 new jobs per month just to keep up with worker population growth. 700 jobs in a one time event, even if they really were in the US, would be not even a drop in the bucket; more like a drop in the swimming pool.
But it sure makes the rubes cheer when the hear about it.
The question is why doesn’t Trump take the lead and bring the production of his products to the States. Or will he exempt himself from the punitive tariffs?
Not to mention that building that wall (assuming it happens), like most things nowadays, will be a highly mechanized affair. So relatively few people will be employed, and most of those will be people already skilled in operating heavy construction equipment.
Did you know that the Chinese have just been blocked from setting up there own mining companies in Australia? The reason they can stock pile is because they buy most of Australia’s minerals, we have a massive COUNTRY with great mineral wealth and a low population (23 mill). The reason only the Chinese buy our minerals is because we charge top dollar for them. I would have thought that with our alliance we should be providing USA with all it needs.
Moreover, like most infrastructure construction projects, it’s presumably intended to be completed within a relatively short time. So whatever temporary employment wall-building may provide will do jack shit to address the fundamental problem of the constant decrease of good blue-collar permanent jobs.
Ford is canceling plans to build a new plant in Mexico. It will invest $700 million in Michigan instead, creating 700 new U.S. jobs.
Ford (F) CEO Mark Fields said the investment is a “vote of confidence” in the pro-business environment being created by Donald Trump. However, he stressed Ford did not do any sort of special deal with the president-elect.
The $700 million investment will go to the Flat Rock, Michigan plant to produce more electric and self-driving cars. Ford believes electrified vehicles will outsell gas-powered vehicles within the next 15 years.
“We didn’t cut a deal with Trump. We did it for our business,” Fields told CNN’s Poppy Harlow in an exclusive interview Tuesday.
Odd that you have problems connecting the dots behind a decrease of blue collar jobs and a flood of cheap illegal labor.
Trump is not even president yet and he’s actively making jobs a priority.
You mean like the Carrier jobs that still went to Mexico?
How about the punishing tariffs he threatened companies with?
Instead, Carrier gets 7 million in tax breaks which will go to automate the factory and eliminate the jobs that were “saved”. And not all of the “saved” jobs were going to Mexico to begin with.
Will he move the production of his own products to the U.S. or will he exempt himself from the punitive tariffs?
Lol, I have no problem with the way it went down, but it has more to do with Ford banking on Nafta not being there when they want to ship cars north and get North American retail for them.
What I said is that wall-building isn’t going to do anything to address the dearth of good blue-collar permanent jobs. Which is the kind of jobs that unskilled and semi-skilled US workers are, not unreasonably, complaining about not being able to get.
“A flood of cheap illegal labor” is not what’s been making good blue-collar permanent jobs in the US so scarce. On the bright side, as noted already in March 2016, some good blue-collar permanent jobs have been reviving in recent years:
Thanks, Obama!
On the less-bright side, though, the Obama-era dawn of US manufacturing revival, such as it is, is very unlikely to grow to something that can fully counteract the net blue-collar jobs loss of previous decades. Automation and globalization are not going to disappear or be reversed, and a lot of the jobs they took away are never coming back.
None of which really has much to do with the presence or absence of undocumented immigrant workers barely subsisting in produce farms or sweatshops with extremely substandard wages and working conditions that US workers have never wanted for themselves anyway.
