Okay, so maybe a bit of a Michael Moore approach? I go to China and start filming the labor riots and unsafe work conditions, maybe even film the vats that contain the lead-based paint? That should raise US awareness I think. Maybe interview a few workers, ask some American parents about the lead in their baby’s toys?
So don’t buy that stuff. “Unsafe levels” of lead per regulations are actually extremely low.
Newsflash: People like to buy cheap shit.
[QUOTE=humanafterall]
Okay, so maybe a bit of a Michael Moore approach? I go to China and start filming the labor riots and unsafe work conditions, maybe even film the vats that contaion the lead-based pain?
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Well, I could point out that McDonald’s sales don’t seem to have suffered much from MM’s efforts, but, again, what is your goal here? What are you trying to achieve? If it’s to bring the jobs from China back to the US then I’m not seeing how this is going to accomplish that goal. All you’ll do is, perhaps, cause American consumers to look for their goods and services that they get from Chinese companies to companies in other parts of the world that also have cheap labor.
I’m not saying to making American consumers aware of possible health effects from goods and services from China is a bad thing (I think you are highly overplaying and overstating the actual threat, but that’s another subject), but it’s not going to accomplish bringing back those jobs to the US. NOTHING is going to EVER bring those jobs back to the US. They are gone for good, for better or worst. We have moved beyond manufacturing that requires large numbers of low skilled workers to accomplish repetitive tasks.
-XT
If that’s your plan, humanafterall, I wouldn’t buy a roundtrip ticket.
I think most people would agree China’s manufacturing standards can be shoddy. It’s a harder to be definitive about how much workers are being paid, but unskilled workers aren’t getting a lot of protection. My take is that China is basically going through its own version of the Gilded Age and things will improve in time. Which doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be pressure whenever they’re falling short.
Yeah but the cheap shit breaks easily, thus proving the trueism, “You get what you pay for!”
I think a lot of Americans remember a time (I don’t, but I’ve read period media) when “Made in Japan” meant “shoddy.” But that only lasted until they got the hang of the thing.
It’s a myth that American manufacturing has disappeared. Our manufacturing sector is larger than it has ever been. It’s just that we don’t employ that many people in manufacturing compared to 50 years ago, and the service sector has grown much faster than the manufacturing sector. So as a percentage of the economy the manufacturing sector is relatively smaller, despite being absolutely larger.
The main reason American manufacturing jobs have shrunk is not overseas competition but automation. Nobody wants to pay somebody twenty dollars an hour to stand at an assembly line and insert tab A into slot B all day every day, when you can build a machine to perform the same function. And face facts, a job where you spend all day every day inserting tab A into slot B is a horrible soul-crushing job. Sweatshop workers didn’t rhapsodize about the wonders of industrialism. It’s just that working a dead-end sweatshop job was better than starving to death in the gutter.
So who wants to work in a sweatshop? Nobody who has a choice. Americans have a choice, and we choose not to work in sweatshops, and sweatshops located in America are invariably staffed by immigrants, some documented some undocumented. A civil war in China isn’t going to bring sweatshop jobs back to the United States, it will just make crappy mass produced crap more expensive because it has to be produced in Indonesia and Brazil instead.
China’s growing economy is the largest decrease in human misery in the history of the world. After a hundred years of literally unbelievable mismanagment, China has turned itself from a dystopian hellhole to a normal crappy poor country. And this is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. You’d send 1.2 billion people into starvation, misery and death, and all to raise the average wage for low-skilled Americans by a dollar or so. If low-skilled Americans are doing so crappily, what’s wrong with welfare, or maybe a rational national health care system? Luckily for everyone on the planet, your wishes will have no effect. Still, the callousness and brutality of your wishes is a bit shocking and disheartening.
[QUOTE=Marley23]
I think most people would agree China’s manufacturing standards can be shoddy. It’s a harder to be definitive about how much workers are being paid, but unskilled workers aren’t getting a lot of protection. My take is that China is basically going through its own version of the Gilded Age and things will improve in time. Which doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be pressure whenever they’re falling short.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I agree…think American before the 1900’s. Say 1870’s through late 1880’s. And I agree…we, as the buyers, have a lot to say as far as the quality of the stuff we are buying. That’s why we have regulations on goods and services after all. And those regulations should be enforced to the letter on imported goods and services, and a country failing to meet those regulations shouldn’t be allowed to sell goods and services that don’t meet our standards. If they don’t like that, they can go sell elsewhere. I’m all over that concept.
This won’t, however, accomplish bringing those jobs back to the US, but it will accomplish other things that will be good, even if it adds some non-zero amount to the end price.
-XT
Alright, so now we have automation, but then what? Why aren’t people getting the educations they need to fix the robots? Robots do break down, and invariably it’s a human that fixes them. So why aren’t we training more people to fix robots and other machinery? I’m trying to leap hurdles, here, people. Is it a money issue? If not, then what?
[QUOTE=humanafterall]
Alright, so now we have automation, but then what? Why aren’t people getting the educations they need to fix the robots? Robots do break down, and invariably it’s a human that fixes them. So why aren’t we training more people to fix robots and other machinery?
[/QUOTE]
Well, leaving aside the fact that ‘we’ don’t train people to do jobs as if they were simply tools to be used (IOW, people decide on their own in the US what jobs they want to pursue and what training or education they do or don’t get), there aren’t a lot of robot repairmen jobs going wanting. If there was some vast gap in the number of robot repairmen we needed verse the number of trained people available then people would voluntarily orient their training and education towards those kinds of jobs. There aren’t so they don’t. Labor is just a market, in the end…and works like any other market. If ‘we’ trained a million robot repairmen where would they work? We don’t NEED a million robot repairmen…we need basically the number that we already have, give or take and depending on the area.
-XT
humanafterall, if you think that Chinese products are shoddy, dangerous, or otherwise inferior, and that the lower prices aren’t enough to make up for that, then you’re more than free to avoid those products, and instead buy higher-quality but more expensive products. If you think that other Americans are unaware of the inferior quality of Chinese products, you’re free to tell us about it, so we can make an informed decision, too. But it may be that some of your fellow citizens will decide that the low price is enough to make up for the quality, and buy them anyway. And for such a person, buying Chinese products is for the best. Why do you want to force people to pay more for products that they already think are good enough?
Because if it took as many people to maintain the automated assembly line as it did to run the manual assembly line, what would be the point of automating? Automation means fewer jobs in that sector. This is why one guy running a combine can harvest as much wheat in a day as 1000 peasants with scythes and threshing flails. Yeah, there are jobs building the combine, and jobs fixing the combine, but not 1000 jobs.
Ideally, every goddam manufacturing job would be automated, and we human beings could sit around drinking wine and strumming the harp. Or posting on Facebook rather than strumming the harp.
Who says they aren’t? When people build factories, they don’t just let them fall apart unless the business dies. Anyway here’s the problem with this example: say you get 10 robots to do the job of 50 people. You then five people to fix the robots. There are still 45 people out of a job.
There is only one conclusion available: people are entirely happy to buying absolutely vast amounts of cheap stuff from China. You can point out that some might have dangers or be crappy or whatever other quibbles you can come up with but in the end the commercial reality speaks for itself. People know the stuff can be crappy. They know it can have lead in it. They know it could be bacterial. They still buy the stuff in absolutely vast amounts because 99.99% of it is fine, at least for the price.
You aren’t going to change this with any pathetic little scare campaign.
Yes.
So it is indeed China, not America that is the Golden Land of Opprtunity? Perhaps not freedom, but fortune.
[QUOTE=humanafterall]
So it is indeed China, not America that is the Golden Land of Opprtunity? Perhaps not freedom, but fortune.
[/QUOTE]
In China the average wage is less than $4k/year (granted, that $4k is going to go further in China than in the US) while it’s roughly $50k/year in the US. Also, a rather large percentage of the worlds goods and services flow through and into the US, while mostly goods flow out of China. So…you tell me which is the ‘Golden Land of Opprtunity’. Do the math. 
-XT
I believe a few weeks after Chairman Mao came into power, the government sent a message to the citizens stating something along the lines of, “As long as you do not oppose us, you will prosper.”
Still, it seems I’m guaranteed a very secure job, until I smart off at the government and get shot, or don’t work fast enough to please my boss.
[QUOTE=humanafterall]
Still, it seems I’m guaranteed a very secure job, until I smart off at the government and get shot, or don’t work fast enough to please my boss.
[/QUOTE]
At a standard of living far below the vast majority of people in Mexico, let alone the US. Doesn’t sound exactly like paradise to me, but different strokes and all that jazz.
And millions died…many of them starved to death during various agricultural reforms that had little to do with opposing the government. Not a whole lot of prosperity during Mao’s reign, but he did dress in pajamas and wore a cool hat, so that’s something.
-XT