4 ms·

Outsourcing manufacturing from a country with labor and environmental regulations to a place where they treat workers like slaves and treat the environment like

Outsourcing manufacturing from a country with labor and environmental regulations to a place where they treat workers like slaves and treat the environment like a trash can would be an example.

bumby 6y ago
Saying it’s immoral is one thing that I can agree with. But that’s different than objectively showing how it makes their lives worse. I’m looking for actual metrics like a decline in life expectancy, income, etc. Just to be clear I’m not on one side or the other because I’m relatively ignorant on the topic. Just looking for evidence
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  Losing your job because it was outsourced is pretty objectively bad. You can go try to find another job in the same industry but all the competing companies are going to be looking at doing the same thing because they have to compete on margins and their competition just reduced their labor cost by a factor of 2 to 10. I don't know what evidence for this would look like except for all the goods that are manufactured overseas that used to be manufactured domestically. I'm not making a statistical argument. I'm making an argument based on life experience and inference. Although life expectancy in the US is declining. Wages are stagnant but that's an aggregate over the population. If a 30-year-old worker loses their job and an 18-year-old worker gets hired in a different industry for the same "real wage" then that looks like no change from the perspective of population statistics.
  - bumby 6y ago
    Yes, but that’s talking to the original point I thought you were attempting to refute. I think there’s a lot of case to be made that globalization is a net negative for US workers, but the point being made was that it may also be a net positive for non-US workers. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed your comments about exporting pollution etc. was that it was a net negative in the non-US as well
    - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
      I think its bad for Earthlings because it pollutes the planet and its bad for the people who lost their jobs because they can maybe afford to replace their consumer goods with crap made overseas but not save for retirement and its bad for the people overseas because they work in factories with no labor protections to make stuff for people in other countries that they cannot themselves afford. I think the whole thing is bad but inevitable.
- idrios 6y ago
  It makes their lives worse because it puts the workers in competition with workers in those other countries. Since you asked for metrics, here is a site for working remotely as a freelancer [1]. You'll quickly notice the pay rates are abysmal. $7/hr for a three.js developer. $250 (or lower, possibly as low s $30) to make a fully functional & tested app on android+iphone (would normally take an entire dev team probably well over 1 or 2 weeks). These are rates below minimum wage for highly technical skills. This is even more true for hardware too but it's hard to quantify, because e.g. you can't just compare the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Shenzhen with the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Cleveland, because Cleveland doesn't manufacture capacitors. However, I do have some data (though it's not the most sophisticatedly obtained). Sticking with capacitors as a benchmark, I was expecting there to be 0 US companies manufacturing capacitors, but apparently there are 7 [2]. In contrast, there are apparently 228 Chinese companies manufacturing capacitors [3]. All of this is just to say it's pretty clear that globalization has moved these jobs overseas (and significantly dropped the market rate for those who remain local). [1] https://www.freelancer.com/jobs/ https://www.freelancer.com/jobs/ [2] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_united_states.html https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_united_states.htm... [3] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_china.html https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_china.html
  - bumby 6y ago
    I agree with this but think it misses the actual point. To paraphrase a popular pundit, “People need to realize that things that are bad for the US may not be bad for the world.” To clarify the point, the US largely rode a post-WW2 manufacturing boom for a couple generations where the relative quality of life for US citizens disproportionately outpaced other countries. Globalization has started to erase that disparity. So while it’s bad for the US middle and working classes it’s largely benefited pulling people out of poverty for other nations, exemplified by China. The irony is that much of this is driven by the US’s addiction to cheap shit. I’m only saying the above because I think people are confusing the discussion, not because I think that it’s the best long term strategy
    - idrios 6y ago

Outsourcing manufacturing from a country with labor and environmental regulations to a place where they treat workers like slaves and treat the environment like a trash can would be an example.

bumby 6y ago

Saying it’s immoral is one thing that I can agree with. But that’s different than objectively showing how it makes their lives worse. I’m looking for actual metrics like a decline in life expectancy, income, etc. Just to be clear I’m not on one side or the other because I’m relatively ignorant on the topic. Just looking for evidence

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
Losing your job because it was outsourced is pretty objectively bad. You can go try to find another job in the same industry but all the competing companies are going to be looking at doing the same thing because they have to compete on margins and their competition just reduced their labor cost by a factor of 2 to 10. I don't know what evidence for this would look like except for all the goods that are manufactured overseas that used to be manufactured domestically. I'm not making a statistical argument. I'm making an argument based on life experience and inference. Although life expectancy in the US is declining. Wages are stagnant but that's an aggregate over the population. If a 30-year-old worker loses their job and an 18-year-old worker gets hired in a different industry for the same "real wage" then that looks like no change from the perspective of population statistics.
- bumby 6y ago
  Yes, but that’s talking to the original point I thought you were attempting to refute. I think there’s a lot of case to be made that globalization is a net negative for US workers, but the point being made was that it may also be a net positive for non-US workers. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed your comments about exporting pollution etc. was that it was a net negative in the non-US as well
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    I think its bad for Earthlings because it pollutes the planet and its bad for the people who lost their jobs because they can maybe afford to replace their consumer goods with crap made overseas but not save for retirement and its bad for the people overseas because they work in factories with no labor protections to make stuff for people in other countries that they cannot themselves afford. I think the whole thing is bad but inevitable.
idrios 6y ago
It makes their lives worse because it puts the workers in competition with workers in those other countries. Since you asked for metrics, here is a site for working remotely as a freelancer [1]. You'll quickly notice the pay rates are abysmal. $7/hr for a three.js developer. $250 (or lower, possibly as low s $30) to make a fully functional & tested app on android+iphone (would normally take an entire dev team probably well over 1 or 2 weeks). These are rates below minimum wage for highly technical skills. This is even more true for hardware too but it's hard to quantify, because e.g. you can't just compare the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Shenzhen with the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Cleveland, because Cleveland doesn't manufacture capacitors. However, I do have some data (though it's not the most sophisticatedly obtained). Sticking with capacitors as a benchmark, I was expecting there to be 0 US companies manufacturing capacitors, but apparently there are 7 [2]. In contrast, there are apparently 228 Chinese companies manufacturing capacitors [3]. All of this is just to say it's pretty clear that globalization has moved these jobs overseas (and significantly dropped the market rate for those who remain local). [1] https://www.freelancer.com/jobs/ https://www.freelancer.com/jobs/ [2] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_united_states.html https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_united_states.htm... [3] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_china.html https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_china.html
- bumby 6y ago
  I agree with this but think it misses the actual point. To paraphrase a popular pundit, “People need to realize that things that are bad for the US may not be bad for the world.” To clarify the point, the US largely rode a post-WW2 manufacturing boom for a couple generations where the relative quality of life for US citizens disproportionately outpaced other countries. Globalization has started to erase that disparity. So while it’s bad for the US middle and working classes it’s largely benefited pulling people out of poverty for other nations, exemplified by China. The irony is that much of this is driven by the US’s addiction to cheap shit. I’m only saying the above because I think people are confusing the discussion, not because I think that it’s the best long term strategy
  - idrios 6y ago