4 ms·

Can you point out some of the ways it was anti-worker? Genuine question btw

maximente 7y ago
it was certainly anti american worker. here are some reasons why: - would have removed US govt general requirement to buy goods produced in america - would have moved jobs to vietnam (lower min. wage than china) instead of back to US, putting downward wage pressure on US manufacturing workers - protect more investments in offshoring than NAFTA does (read: incentivize offshoring) in both manufacturing and services http://cepr.net/documents/publications/TPP-2013-09.pdf http://cepr.net/documents/publications/TPP-2013-09.pdf
- ABeeSea 7y ago
  Those aren’t necessarily bad for American workers. American manufacturing is high skill and involves precision equipment and manufacturing. What would have moved to Vietnam would have been more basic textiles and cnc/molding. Not sure why everyone glorifies basic manufacturing work like it’s the pinnacle of American labor.
  - pesmhey 7y ago
    Because it used to be, and a lot of people never really made the transition. An incredibly unfortunate situation, for everyone.
    - neltnerb 7y ago
      When less big construction happens, we lose the experience and skill to build things that we used to do without complaint, and this works its way up the value chain until we cannot build a complex machine without parts from far away. Alternatively, we leapfrog a generation of manufacturing processes and go straight to high speed 3D printing and clothing made from recovered landfill materials by nanobots. I don't know if what we need is more protection or faster innovation. The two tend to work in opposite directions. Certainly they require different training and expectations.
  - mc32 7y ago
    Because now those people work even “better” gig jobs or warehouse work for retailers or crappy retail jobs... But yeah, really good for American workers so we can buy more shitty products which we can throw into the landfill...
  - CharlesColeman 7y ago
    > Not sure why everyone glorifies basic manufacturing work like it’s the pinnacle of American labor. War requires a lot of basic manufacturing capacity, and geopolitically those aren't good things to lose.
    - killjoywashere 7y ago
      Geopolitically, would it not be better too have a world economy that is to interdependent to support war as a viable path to resolution of differences.
      - azinman2 7y ago
        You don’t always chose who goes to war with you.
      - ericd 7y ago
        I remember reading somewhere that people in the run-up to WW1 were saying that war was impossible, we'd entered a new age, the world was too interdependent to go to war, there was too much trade. Nations with all the manufacturing and farming they need to survive regardless may not feel so restrained. And countries can always form self-sufficient blocs.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - winter_blue 7y ago
      > War requires a lot of basic manufacturing capacity A lot (if not most) of military machinery is still manufactured in the US. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build our planes. General Dynamics, Oshkosh, and others build our tanks. Raytheon makes some of our missiles. In fact, here's full list of who's building our defense tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_contractors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_... -- As you can see, it's mostly home-grown and home-based American companies. We've done a very good job of keeping our most critical and sensitive manufacturing jobs inside the states. It's mostly consumer goods manufacturing that's moved abroad. I don't see any particular benefit in bringing it back stateside. Making things in low-wage countries like Vietnam or China dramatically slashes costs for the consumers, allowing us American consumers to live a more lavish lifestyle. Forcing consumer goods to be manufactured in the U.S. would dramatically drive up their prices, and in effect be an indirect tax on the American consumer. Moreover, the U.S. is nearly at full employment. Who's going to staff the factories that will make consumer goods? With the extreme hostility to immigration we have under the folks in charge now, I don't see any new immigrants being let in to work at these new factories. Companies would be forced to build fully automated factories (due to labor shortage), and there'll be jarring period of high consumer goods prices while software engineers write code for new robotic/automated manufacturing of basic goods. Maybe in the end, this newly written software will (with its development cost amortized over time) allow us to undercut the prices of even low-wage human-requiring manufacturing and become a reigning manufacturer of all sorts of things -- but that benefit feels fairly remote, far-fetched, and hard-to-achieve.
  - skokage 7y ago
    >What would have moved to Vietnam would have been more basic textiles and cnc/molding. And these are the types of jobs that provided a decent living wage for the middle/lower-middle class, of which a lot of people in the midwest and rustbelt use to do, and the loss of such jobs has decimated these communities. Service sector, warehouse fulfillment, and gig economy jobs don't provide nearly the value, nor do they provide the types of benefits that former jobs did. Edit - Not sure why my comment is being downvoted. A lot of the jobs in the midwest were things like basic factory work of plastic products, textiles, CNC machining, molding (of which my dad was previously employed doing), and other things of that nature which have been outsourced over the decades. These jobs not only provided a stable livable wage, but most of them also provided benefits such as health/dental insurance for not only the workers but their entire families. These jobs have left over the years, and nothing which provided the same standards of living has come into replace them. States such as michigan, illinois, ohio, wisconsin, and others in that area have been hit hard over the past few decades because of these changes in the global economy.
    - malcolmxtucker 7y ago
      The entire reason those manufacturing jobs were offshored is because the cost of cheap, unskilled (legal) labor in the US is relatively exorbitant, moreso in unionized industries. The big failure of manufacturing-dependent states has been the lack of modern skills training for workers with outmoded skillsets. There's also an argument to be made that unlike assembly line work, not everyone has the intellectual capacity to do the specialized, highly-technical manufacturing work that the US specializes in now. Definitely not to the extent that entire communities can be propped up around manufacturing anymore. What you're advocating is a regressive solution that doesn't really comport with modern realities.
  - maximente 7y ago
    you are being disingenuous when you say "everyone glorifies basic manufacturing work" as i never indicated anything of the sort, so i'm wary of engaging you further. but, for whatever it's worth, the average US growth rate for advanced technology product exports was higher before Jan 1 1994 (NAFTA) than it was afterwards up until most recent data, 2018. i didn't look at imports, but suspect that the rate of import is higher/increasing. there are various interpretations of that, one of which could be that global demand for high tech stuff is simply slowing outside the US, but that seems unlikely given how much tech is blowing up generally. another one of which that seems solid is that manufacturing "body of knowledge" / infrastructure probably allows tooling up the workforce and chipping away at high tech sort of stuff that the US may have had a dominant position in.
- coryrc 7y ago
  > would have removed US govt general requirement to buy goods produced in america Maybe we'd actually have cost-effective mass transit then.

it was certainly anti american worker. here are some reasons why: - would have removed US govt general requirement to buy goods produced in america - would have moved jobs to vietnam (lower min. wage than china) instead of back to US, putting downward wage pressure on US manufacturing workers - protect more investments in offshoring than NAFTA does (read: incentivize offshoring) in both manufacturing and services http://cepr.net/documents/publications/TPP-2013-09.pdf http://cepr.net/documents/publications/TPP-2013-09.pdf

ABeeSea 7y ago
Those aren’t necessarily bad for American workers. American manufacturing is high skill and involves precision equipment and manufacturing. What would have moved to Vietnam would have been more basic textiles and cnc/molding. Not sure why everyone glorifies basic manufacturing work like it’s the pinnacle of American labor.
- pesmhey 7y ago
  Because it used to be, and a lot of people never really made the transition. An incredibly unfortunate situation, for everyone.
  - neltnerb 7y ago
    When less big construction happens, we lose the experience and skill to build things that we used to do without complaint, and this works its way up the value chain until we cannot build a complex machine without parts from far away. Alternatively, we leapfrog a generation of manufacturing processes and go straight to high speed 3D printing and clothing made from recovered landfill materials by nanobots. I don't know if what we need is more protection or faster innovation. The two tend to work in opposite directions. Certainly they require different training and expectations.
- mc32 7y ago
  Because now those people work even “better” gig jobs or warehouse work for retailers or crappy retail jobs... But yeah, really good for American workers so we can buy more shitty products which we can throw into the landfill...
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > Not sure why everyone glorifies basic manufacturing work like it’s the pinnacle of American labor. War requires a lot of basic manufacturing capacity, and geopolitically those aren't good things to lose.
  - killjoywashere 7y ago
    Geopolitically, would it not be better too have a world economy that is to interdependent to support war as a viable path to resolution of differences.
    - azinman2 7y ago
      You don’t always chose who goes to war with you.
    - ericd 7y ago
      I remember reading somewhere that people in the run-up to WW1 were saying that war was impossible, we'd entered a new age, the world was too interdependent to go to war, there was too much trade. Nations with all the manufacturing and farming they need to survive regardless may not feel so restrained. And countries can always form self-sufficient blocs.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - winter_blue 7y ago
    > War requires a lot of basic manufacturing capacity A lot (if not most) of military machinery is still manufactured in the US. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build our planes. General Dynamics, Oshkosh, and others build our tanks. Raytheon makes some of our missiles. In fact, here's full list of who's building our defense tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_contractors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_... -- As you can see, it's mostly home-grown and home-based American companies. We've done a very good job of keeping our most critical and sensitive manufacturing jobs inside the states. It's mostly consumer goods manufacturing that's moved abroad. I don't see any particular benefit in bringing it back stateside. Making things in low-wage countries like Vietnam or China dramatically slashes costs for the consumers, allowing us American consumers to live a more lavish lifestyle. Forcing consumer goods to be manufactured in the U.S. would dramatically drive up their prices, and in effect be an indirect tax on the American consumer. Moreover, the U.S. is nearly at full employment. Who's going to staff the factories that will make consumer goods? With the extreme hostility to immigration we have under the folks in charge now, I don't see any new immigrants being let in to work at these new factories. Companies would be forced to build fully automated factories (due to labor shortage), and there'll be jarring period of high consumer goods prices while software engineers write code for new robotic/automated manufacturing of basic goods. Maybe in the end, this newly written software will (with its development cost amortized over time) allow us to undercut the prices of even low-wage human-requiring manufacturing and become a reigning manufacturer of all sorts of things -- but that benefit feels fairly remote, far-fetched, and hard-to-achieve.
- skokage 7y ago
  >What would have moved to Vietnam would have been more basic textiles and cnc/molding. And these are the types of jobs that provided a decent living wage for the middle/lower-middle class, of which a lot of people in the midwest and rustbelt use to do, and the loss of such jobs has decimated these communities. Service sector, warehouse fulfillment, and gig economy jobs don't provide nearly the value, nor do they provide the types of benefits that former jobs did. Edit - Not sure why my comment is being downvoted. A lot of the jobs in the midwest were things like basic factory work of plastic products, textiles, CNC machining, molding (of which my dad was previously employed doing), and other things of that nature which have been outsourced over the decades. These jobs not only provided a stable livable wage, but most of them also provided benefits such as health/dental insurance for not only the workers but their entire families. These jobs have left over the years, and nothing which provided the same standards of living has come into replace them. States such as michigan, illinois, ohio, wisconsin, and others in that area have been hit hard over the past few decades because of these changes in the global economy.
  - malcolmxtucker 7y ago
    The entire reason those manufacturing jobs were offshored is because the cost of cheap, unskilled (legal) labor in the US is relatively exorbitant, moreso in unionized industries. The big failure of manufacturing-dependent states has been the lack of modern skills training for workers with outmoded skillsets. There's also an argument to be made that unlike assembly line work, not everyone has the intellectual capacity to do the specialized, highly-technical manufacturing work that the US specializes in now. Definitely not to the extent that entire communities can be propped up around manufacturing anymore. What you're advocating is a regressive solution that doesn't really comport with modern realities.
- maximente 7y ago
  you are being disingenuous when you say "everyone glorifies basic manufacturing work" as i never indicated anything of the sort, so i'm wary of engaging you further. but, for whatever it's worth, the average US growth rate for advanced technology product exports was higher before Jan 1 1994 (NAFTA) than it was afterwards up until most recent data, 2018. i didn't look at imports, but suspect that the rate of import is higher/increasing. there are various interpretations of that, one of which could be that global demand for high tech stuff is simply slowing outside the US, but that seems unlikely given how much tech is blowing up generally. another one of which that seems solid is that manufacturing "body of knowledge" / infrastructure probably allows tooling up the workforce and chipping away at high tech sort of stuff that the US may have had a dominant position in.
coryrc 7y ago
> would have removed US govt general requirement to buy goods produced in america Maybe we'd actually have cost-effective mass transit then.