6 ms·

In a global economy, workers have no leverage. If a group tries to form a union, the work goes elsewhere. Globalism exploits the fact that there are people will

In a global economy, workers have no leverage. If a group tries to form a union, the work goes elsewhere. Globalism exploits the fact that there are people willing to work for $1/hr, and leads to many of the problems of capitalism predicted by Marx and friends in the early 1900s. As long as globalization is allowed to continue, inequality within the US will just grow worse.

bobwaycott 10y ago
Small nit: Marx worked and predicted these issues in the mid-1800s. He died in 1883.
Sone7 10y ago
Globalization is not the enemy. Centralised globalization with a handful of megacorps dominating the global economy is fucking awful however. Protectionism is at best a short term solution that comes with a host of other problems. The major threats to our existence are global problems like climate change and nuclear arsenals. Fighting against all globalization will only divide us. I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species. We have near instant communication, the ability to translate between languages is developing rapidly, and automation can potentially, realistically, make it so that work is truly optional. Fighting against all globalization and protecting US interests above all others is, I would think, very much not what 'Marx and friends' would have had in mind.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > Globalization is not the enemy. The problem is there are two kinds. The classic one, and the one you can easily defend, was just eliminating tariffs. Don't discriminate against foreign businesses; treat them the same as local businesses. But there is another one that generally gets called "harmonization", and that's the one that kills everything. Because what it means in practice is the undemocratic international enforcement of regulations created via regulatory capture. You enforce the same rules everywhere, those rules are created by megacorps to give them an advantage and the predictable result obtains.
  - mantas 10y ago
    The classical one does quite a bit harm too. Western/1st/etc world (used to?) treat workers well. The rest of the world didn't. Once tariffs are eliminated, all countries join the rat race to the bottom. How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? Naturally the conditions equalise. The good ones get worse, while bad ones adopt a thing or two.
    - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
      > How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? In theory the idea is that they're not supposed to -- if you have unskilled work with no geographical restrictions, you do it where there is the lowest labor cost, and then everyone benefits by paying lower prices. Meanwhile western countries do the higher paying jobs that require a skilled workforce and the unskilled workers in western countries either do service jobs that do have geographical requirements or go to school and become skilled workers. One of the things that's been killing us on that front is the broken welfare system that puts high marginal rates on lower income people through benefits phase outs, which makes it so that middle class people can't afford to hire lower income people to do service jobs, because 80% of the money goes to the government in benefits phase outs. Which means those people become unemployed, and the higher unemployment rate pushes down unskilled wages, erodes the tax base and increases the total cost government is paying out in benefits to the unemployed.
      - mantas 10y ago
        And it turns out that those cheap countries can produce skilled work too, without becoming expensive and as caring about the workers. Yet bigger than expected portion of western countries' population does not perform well in skilled work market..
- nercht12 10y ago
  >> I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species. What do you mean by "ability"? Opportunity? I don't see how any particular economic status of anyone can be guaranteed with regards to what you're saying. How I see it: The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Once the rich have all the wealth, they go elsewhere with it. Corporations move to Singapore to save money. Automation will only benefit those who own it. Once things are automated, most people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford even the things that are produced by automation. The rich aren't going to share, and if they do, they do it with strings attached so they can manipulate the spending and promote their own agendas (which is what they do now anyways). The biggest problem is simply human selfishness. Because of it, there will never be peace. There will always be people seeking more than they need, always seeking their own survival over that of others, always seeking to crush others to give themselves a boost physically/economically/egotistically/etc. There will never be world peace as long as people are selfish, which basically makes world peace a pipe dream. Sorry to step on toes, but that's life.
  - simonh 10y ago
    > The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. How do you explain the massive transformation of China from a backward rural basket case, to a dynamic modern manufacturing led economy in which industrial employment and industrial labour wages have both rocketed in the last 20 years? That has come at a cost. Manufacturing really has transferred from the West to the East. Yet the West doesn't have mass unemployment and job vacancies for skilled workers are at an all-time high in the West. The problem is that low skilled jobs have gone East and the West is moving up into high value services jobs, but our training and education systems have adapted too slowly to bring our worker pools along for the ride. The answer is not to turn back the clock, it's to ride the economic wave and up-skill our labor pool because too many people in the west are being left behind in unskilled jobs, when actually there are plenty of skilled job vacancies available compared the the actual number of unemployed.
    - nercht12 10y ago
yummyfajitas 10y ago
Meanwhile, global inequality has gone down, because desperately poor Indians and Chinese have grown significantly wealthier. https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/web-producers/062816carney-Elephant.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/web-... I feel so bad for those rich westerners with a house, running water, 24/7 electricity, free schools, etc.
- mistermann 10y ago
  The fact that living conditions improving for people in the 3rd world makes you feel better maybe doesn't do as much for "rich westerners" whose jobs have moved overseas.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Helping the less rich Americans does nothing for the 1% either. What's your point?
    - nercht12 10y ago
      I think he means you're taking from one to give to another, which eventually results in the former being as worse off as the latter was, so the sum total of your "humanitarian effort" ultimately amounts to zero. But that's a guess.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        That's actually not true. The number of people living in absolute poverty (for various definitions of it) has gone down drastically. http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworldindata_world-poverty-since-1820-in-absolute-numbers.png http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworl... http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-1179761045903/3798749-1330548119519/poverty_line_450x378.gif http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-11797610... https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20130601_FBC698.png https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/... Really, the only issue seems to be a loss of status (not goods and services) by some rich white westerners. (Non-white westerners seem to have improved their situation by quite a bit also.)
simonh 10y ago
In terms of driving down third world poverty and lifting hundreds of thousands of people out of hand-to-mouth existences globalization is unbelievably effective. A large fraction of the rural poor in China are now skilled workers. Factory laborer wages in China have rocketed in the last 15 years just as the number of such laborers has also shot up. The massive expansion of IT companies in India is sucking huge amounts of money into the Indian economy while driving down the costs of services in the West. So it depends on what you think is most important. Yes many manufacturing jobs have moved out of the West, yet overall unemployment in the Western world is not particularly high. In the US it's fallen by half in the last 5 years to historically fairly low levels and job vacancies are at an all time high because businesses are having difficulty finding skilled or experienced workers. the real problem in the actual jobs market is training and education, not de-industrialization. The anti-globalization narrative is utter claptrap peddled by a 70's soviet-era industrialist view of the world where all we had to do was put everybody in factories and we'd everything would be fine. Actually, it wasn't true back then either, hence the collapse of the Soviet Union. The globalization equation has nothing to do with transfers of wealth from Western world labour to Western world fat cats. It's mainly about transfers of wealth from Western world labour to eastern world labour. The solution isn't to reverse that trend and impoverish foreigners. It's to climb our economies up the value chain and capture more global wealth. We have been doing that, but we're just not doing it fast enough.

bobwaycott 10y ago

Small nit: Marx worked and predicted these issues in the mid-1800s. He died in 1883.

Sone7 10y ago

Globalization is not the enemy. Centralised globalization with a handful of megacorps dominating the global economy is fucking awful however. Protectionism is at best a short term solution that comes with a host of other problems. The major threats to our existence are global problems like climate change and nuclear arsenals. Fighting against all globalization will only divide us. I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species. We have near instant communication, the ability to translate between languages is developing rapidly, and automation can potentially, realistically, make it so that work is truly optional. Fighting against all globalization and protecting US interests above all others is, I would think, very much not what 'Marx and friends' would have had in mind.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> Globalization is not the enemy. The problem is there are two kinds. The classic one, and the one you can easily defend, was just eliminating tariffs. Don't discriminate against foreign businesses; treat them the same as local businesses. But there is another one that generally gets called "harmonization", and that's the one that kills everything. Because what it means in practice is the undemocratic international enforcement of regulations created via regulatory capture. You enforce the same rules everywhere, those rules are created by megacorps to give them an advantage and the predictable result obtains.
- mantas 10y ago
  The classical one does quite a bit harm too. Western/1st/etc world (used to?) treat workers well. The rest of the world didn't. Once tariffs are eliminated, all countries join the rat race to the bottom. How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? Naturally the conditions equalise. The good ones get worse, while bad ones adopt a thing or two.
  - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > How can western countries with good social safety net, reasonable work hours and good wages compete with cut-throat conditions in Asia? In theory the idea is that they're not supposed to -- if you have unskilled work with no geographical restrictions, you do it where there is the lowest labor cost, and then everyone benefits by paying lower prices. Meanwhile western countries do the higher paying jobs that require a skilled workforce and the unskilled workers in western countries either do service jobs that do have geographical requirements or go to school and become skilled workers. One of the things that's been killing us on that front is the broken welfare system that puts high marginal rates on lower income people through benefits phase outs, which makes it so that middle class people can't afford to hire lower income people to do service jobs, because 80% of the money goes to the government in benefits phase outs. Which means those people become unemployed, and the higher unemployment rate pushes down unskilled wages, erodes the tax base and increases the total cost government is paying out in benefits to the unemployed.
    - mantas 10y ago
      And it turns out that those cheap countries can produce skilled work too, without becoming expensive and as caring about the workers. Yet bigger than expected portion of western countries' population does not perform well in skilled work market..
nercht12 10y ago
>> I believe that the best leverage workers of the world can have is the ability to live a decent life without the threat of starvation or extreme poverty. This dream is attainable, and worth planning for and building towards as a species. What do you mean by "ability"? Opportunity? I don't see how any particular economic status of anyone can be guaranteed with regards to what you're saying. How I see it: The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Once the rich have all the wealth, they go elsewhere with it. Corporations move to Singapore to save money. Automation will only benefit those who own it. Once things are automated, most people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford even the things that are produced by automation. The rich aren't going to share, and if they do, they do it with strings attached so they can manipulate the spending and promote their own agendas (which is what they do now anyways). The biggest problem is simply human selfishness. Because of it, there will never be peace. There will always be people seeking more than they need, always seeking their own survival over that of others, always seeking to crush others to give themselves a boost physically/economically/egotistically/etc. There will never be world peace as long as people are selfish, which basically makes world peace a pipe dream. Sorry to step on toes, but that's life.
- simonh 10y ago
  > The rich get richer and the poor, poorer. How do you explain the massive transformation of China from a backward rural basket case, to a dynamic modern manufacturing led economy in which industrial employment and industrial labour wages have both rocketed in the last 20 years? That has come at a cost. Manufacturing really has transferred from the West to the East. Yet the West doesn't have mass unemployment and job vacancies for skilled workers are at an all-time high in the West. The problem is that low skilled jobs have gone East and the West is moving up into high value services jobs, but our training and education systems have adapted too slowly to bring our worker pools along for the ride. The answer is not to turn back the clock, it's to ride the economic wave and up-skill our labor pool because too many people in the west are being left behind in unskilled jobs, when actually there are plenty of skilled job vacancies available compared the the actual number of unemployed.
  - nercht12 10y ago

yummyfajitas 10y ago

Meanwhile, global inequality has gone down, because desperately poor Indians and Chinese have grown significantly wealthier. https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/web-producers/062816carney-Elephant.png https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.washingtonexaminer.biz/web-... I feel so bad for those rich westerners with a house, running water, 24/7 electricity, free schools, etc.

mistermann 10y ago
The fact that living conditions improving for people in the 3rd world makes you feel better maybe doesn't do as much for "rich westerners" whose jobs have moved overseas.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Helping the less rich Americans does nothing for the 1% either. What's your point?
  - nercht12 10y ago
    I think he means you're taking from one to give to another, which eventually results in the former being as worse off as the latter was, so the sum total of your "humanitarian effort" ultimately amounts to zero. But that's a guess.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      That's actually not true. The number of people living in absolute poverty (for various definitions of it) has gone down drastically. http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworldindata_world-poverty-since-1820-in-absolute-numbers.png http://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/ourworl... http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-1179761045903/3798749-1330548119519/poverty_line_450x378.gif http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Images/84796-11797610... https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20130601_FBC698.png https://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/... Really, the only issue seems to be a loss of status (not goods and services) by some rich white westerners. (Non-white westerners seem to have improved their situation by quite a bit also.)

simonh 10y ago

In terms of driving down third world poverty and lifting hundreds of thousands of people out of hand-to-mouth existences globalization is unbelievably effective. A large fraction of the rural poor in China are now skilled workers. Factory laborer wages in China have rocketed in the last 15 years just as the number of such laborers has also shot up. The massive expansion of IT companies in India is sucking huge amounts of money into the Indian economy while driving down the costs of services in the West. So it depends on what you think is most important. Yes many manufacturing jobs have moved out of the West, yet overall unemployment in the Western world is not particularly high. In the US it's fallen by half in the last 5 years to historically fairly low levels and job vacancies are at an all time high because businesses are having difficulty finding skilled or experienced workers. the real problem in the actual jobs market is training and education, not de-industrialization. The anti-globalization narrative is utter claptrap peddled by a 70's soviet-era industrialist view of the world where all we had to do was put everybody in factories and we'd everything would be fine. Actually, it wasn't true back then either, hence the collapse of the Soviet Union. The globalization equation has nothing to do with transfers of wealth from Western world labour to Western world fat cats. It's mainly about transfers of wealth from Western world labour to eastern world labour. The solution isn't to reverse that trend and impoverish foreigners. It's to climb our economies up the value chain and capture more global wealth. We have been doing that, but we're just not doing it fast enough.