Pitiful wages, anti-union policies and corporate welfare to make America competitive with China

According to a Boston Consulting Group report, the US is in for a manufacturing renaissance, thanks to plummeting wages and toothless labor protection policies in the American south. These factors, combined with the rising value of the Chinese RMB, rising wages in China and government handouts for corporations who locate in the USA make it more profitable to pay sub-starvation wages in America than in China.

But will American workers be willing to sign pledges promising not to commit suicide?

With Chinese wages rising at about 17 percent per year and the value of the yuan continuing to increase, the gap between U.S. and Chinese wages is narrowing rapidly. Meanwhile, flexible work rules and a host of government incentives are making many states--including Mississippi, South Carolina, and Alabama--increasingly competitive as low-cost bases for supplying the U.S. market...
"Workers and unions are more willing to accept concessions to bring jobs back to the U.S.," noted Michael Zinser, a BCG partner who leads the firm's manufacturing work in the Americas. "Support from state and local governments can tip the balance."

Reinvestment During the Next Five Years Could Usher in a 'Manufacturing Renaissance' as the U.S. Becomes a Low-Cost Country Among Developed Nations, According to Analysis by The Boston Consulting Group (via Futurismic)

(Image: A factory producing telephone cable in Shanghai. This is the "Research Department". The banner above urges support for the Dominican people in their struggle against U.S. imperialism., a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from thomasfisherlibrary's photostream)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Anonymous

Over the past 2 years, I have lost over 50% of my illustration work to China. How can I compete against workers who can live off of $35 a day? The clients (including recently, the American Cancer Society) do not care about quality, just as long it is a cheap as possible and “good enough”.
Anonymous

The US is a developed nation? Used to be a developed nation, maybe, but it’s spent the past 30 years alternately standing still and regressing.

Today the US is a pretty good place to be a millionaire or billionaire – you get to keep most of your money and you can always go overseas when you want something decent. For the rest of us, forget it.
AnthonyC

As wages in China rise, companies are far more likely to move production to southeast Asia (already happening) or various African countries (local political situations permitting) than back to the US. Even so, it shouldn’t be surprising that, when developing countries can grow economically at 10% a year, pretty soon the labor will not be cheap enough to justify the shipping costs (not to mention dealing with multiple governments).

At current growth rates, China is only about 25 years away from matching the US in GDP per capita. And realistically, we can expect shipping costs to increase quite a bit in that time frame.
Tzctboin

Capitalism is a race to the bottom price, and wages are the price of labour by another name. This is economics 101 really, people crying wolf about this frankly don’t deserve to be involved on this adult conversation.

The only way to make things fairer would be by international, verifiable agreements in all kind of issues: the environment, worker’s rights etc, but in the US all those issues will never fly because half of you USians are utterly bonkers (check the Oxford dictionary if you must), so they continue to impose their traditional unilateralism, consider anathema proper workers’ rights, and many of them are global climate change denialists.

I am sorry, but I feel very little pitty for the US working class who has allowed all this to happen without much of an utterance.
- Oceanconcepts
  
  Capitalism is a race to the bottom price, and wages are the price of labour by another name. This is economics 101 really, people crying wolf about this frankly don’t deserve to be involved on this adult conversation.
  
  Wile not being one to defend the more shortsighted or exploitative policies of the US, and while I believe capitalist economies require regulation and balancing, I think you need a historical reality check. And maybe to take that Econ 101 class.
  
  Market economies have been responsible for vastly increasing the wealth, standard of living, longevity, health, education, access to justice, and overall well-being of their citizens to a degree unprecedented in the evolution of the human (or any other known) species. It’s not always been perfect, but a race to the bottom it is not.
  - Neon Tooth
    
    I imagine the when Tzetboin said “Capitalism” that he/she wasn’t referring to a strongly regulated mixed economy with strong protections for labor as you are, but rather free market inspired “neoliberalism”,
- Anonymous
  
  So sorry you still can’t understand the traditional American distrust for authority. I’ll try one more time. Rules require enforcement. The more rules, the more enforcement. The more enforcement, the more likely it is that the enforcers will abuse their power to benefit themselves.
  
  And since you are apparently British, I’ll refrain out of courtesy from pointing out who’s government taught us these lessons, at the very beginning of our nation’s existence.
Neon Tooth

Our living standards did constantly drop for the last 30 years and will continue to do so for some time. Those of the workers in China will rise as they already do and faster than most, especially in the West, believe it possible.

That drop in standards is more do to an embracing of neoliberal economic policies than any kind of inevitable righting of the world balance. We are a fabulously rich country but we loot our treasury to enrich our wealthiest.
- Anonymous
  
  As one of my professors pointed out, The redistribution of wealth upwards and the control of government by plutocrats isn’t a conspiracy. It’s the system working as it was intended to work. It should come as no surprise that the govt. strikes against workers rights.
  
  Add to that the systematic deconstruction of constitutional rights and you’re going to see a US that isn’t exceptional, but is the height of corruption and cronyism.
Anonymous

Union busting has never improved conditions for the working class. It is only a way to shift economic resources and power to the upper class.

If the US gets some inflow of unlivable wage work then that will be used as an excuse of right wing politicians elsewhere to further erode workers rights. And on and on goes the race to the bottom. The US should instead start taxing its economic elite more and use military force against tax havens.
Oceanconcepts

As the founder of an entrepreneurial technology company (specialized instrumentation) actually responsible for creating products that are currently being manufactured in the US and sold successfully and globally, I think I have standing to comment. The China comparison is false and misleading.

Value-added is the only sensible way to look at manufacturing and balance of trade. China at present adds little value to most of the products that are put in their balance-of-trade column. For the iPhone, for instance, it’s less than $17. Even though our products are assembled in the US, most of the high value components that go into them (representing most of the value added) are not manufactured in the US- but they come from Germany, Japan, Switzerland, Denmark, and Korea- i.e. mostly from high wage countries with full health care and good worker protections- and a strong manufacturing base. Cheap Chinese labor is not why the US has lost this sort of manufacturing. And it isn’t necessary to degrade the US middle class in order to improve prosperity in the rest of the world- as a matter of fact that is probably counter productive if your goal is increasing global prosperity. We don’t have to drag down American wages to improve the standard of living in the rest of the world. It’s not a zero-sum game.

Manufacturing is important. Losing manufacturing is a path to losing our creative edge. Itâ€™s a fantasy to believe we can educate some kind of technical elite absent a connection to the physical reality of making things. Why are we losing high quality manufacturing? Because the economic policies of the last 40 years didn’t value keeping manufacturing here, and devalued labor. It is not because of government regulations, or environmental standards, or labor unions- most of the countries that make our components have stronger standards than we do. But the oligarchy is gaining power and seeking to exploit the American economy as if we were a banana republic. Low wages and weak unions are in their short term interest.

This tiny elite has become obscenely rich, not because of creating or building anything, but because they were able to manipulate the financial system in a way to take wealth and power from the majority. They are the ones working to kill US manufacturing, to enrich themselves further- in the short term, which seems to be their only perspective. In the long run, if the middle class goes, the economy weakens for rich and poor alike.
- PaulR
  
  Thanks, Oceanconcepts! People need to be reminded. Over and over.
otterson

I’m calling bullshit on this.

BMW is making lots of quality cars in South Carolina.

Honda and Mercedes-Benz are both manufacturing in Alabama.

Nissan is building cars in Tennessee.

I live in a neighboring state (Georgia) and I can tell you with all assurance — those people are not working as wage slaves. They are damned happy to have those well-paying jobs with decent benefits.

Compare and contrast that with the automotive industry in Georgia. HUGE Ford and GM plants near Atlanta — All UAW — closed. Plenty of work at the Kia plant, though. NOT UAW.

“Workers and unions are more willing to make concessions” says the article. Well, yes. Even the UAW realizes they bled their cash cow dry (pardon the mixed metaphor.) GENERAL MOTORS, once the worlds largest manufacturer of Motor Vehicles WAS GIFTED WITH CORPORATE WELFARE so they could continue to operate ON THE TERMS OF THEIR CONTRACTS WITH ORGANIZED LABOR. Yes. The American Taxpayer bailed them out after their contracts with the UAW nearly bankrupted them.

The article does not say anything about “plummeting wages” or “pitiful wages” in the American South. It is certainly true that many Southern states are “right-to-work” states, but all that means is that **you don’t have to join the union if you don’t want to.**

Folks: read TFA yourself. The link is at the top of the page. Talk to some of the “exploited American workers” and make up your own mind.
The Chemist

Shock Doctrine anyone?
- millie fink
  
  Yep, I’ll second that as a factor here. I (also?) think this process of gradual ( though overall severe) decline in Western workers’ expectations is basically inevitable, since the allegiance felt by their monied overlords to nationalistic sentiment has also declined. While rich “Americans” used to feel some connection to their country, some patriotism, I suspect that’s pretty much been replaced now by naked self-interest.
  - BB
    
    I think that it was always there, but balanced by oversight to a degree and a ladder of classes. The more wealthy the rich became, and the less money in the middle class, pushing them further to poor, the more the power and influence shifted in one direction: up.
    - millie fink
      
      Yes, thanks, I did leave out the disappearance of the middle class. Which has also been the plan all along, or rather, since it began facing the wrath of Ronnie’s Raygun.
  - Anonymous
    
    Seems like that might be a problem with globalism. Ease of travel makes nationality less important. Fair and free markets are the bane of capitalism.
  - Ringo
    
    You got that spot on correct.
- turn_self_off
  
  Worked wonders in Russia and Iraq… /s
GreenJello

Living here in the heart land, it’s also pretty clear that shipping costs are an enormous help. Ohio is literally 600 miles away from 80% of the US, which is the reason why Cincinnati has one of the largest train switching yards in the world. (Chicago just barely bet us to be THE rail hub) Unlike my time living on the coasts, I receive just about any package within a day or so. As a company that values quick delivery this is the perfect place to be, unlike places on the edge like both the coasts.
IamInnocent

Why exactly should any Western worker be paid more than any equally educated or competent worker from the rest of the World ? Once earnings have evened out somewhat, there will be plenty of occasions to pick up the fight for workers rights again… on a more International scale shall we say?
- Cory Doctorow
  
  Here’s another way of putting it: why shouldn’t a worker in a “free” country earn more than a worker in a totalitarian state where the right to organize, the right to move to a new city for work, the right to a safe workplace, and the right to freely communicate with your fellow workers are all abridged by the state?
  - Ceronomus
    
    The simple reason is that the majority of consumers don’t care about any of that, they care about the bottom line price. Look at Walmart. Does anyone else remember when it sold ONLY products made in the US? Now it is THE retail giant, because everything it sells is CHEAP.
    - Wally Ballou
      
      Precisely. Demagogues like Trump can get the idiot vote by saying things like “I’ll take down those Chinese motherfuckers”, because they fail to add, “Once I’ve done that, get used to paying 50% more for everything you buy at the department store”.
    - Crowing
      
      I, for one, am getting sick of the insane release schedules, especially for technology. Every year, like clockwork, comes a new version of whatever perfectly suitable device with, in many cases, very few actual changes. I once had a stainless steel kitchen in an old apartment that was literally 50 years old and still held up like a tank. Quality not quantity is what I’m after, but we’re not interested because making everyone purchase a new tablet/phone/PC/television every year is more lucrative.
      - Ceronomus
        
        Planned obsolescence, the bane of consumers. When there is a lightbulb that has been burning for over 100 years, why can’t I get one for my outdoor light that lasts more than a few months?
        
        Shoddy craftsmanship? Nope. No craftsmanship…the craftsman are all gone, replaced by people who only think of the bottom line and not about the consumer.
        
        Meanwhile, as wages get lower in the US, people can’t afford to purchase items at a higher price, and the downward spiral continues.
- Anonymous
  
  This isn’t a rising tide to float all boats. It’s a race to the bottom.
- andrei.timoshenko
  
  No freedom of movement of goods or of capital without freedom of movement of labour. I am all for economic liberalism, but selective liberalism designed to benefit a small elite is neither economically nor ethically justifiable.
  
  On a side note, starting every human being out in life at the same level of access to capital will likely redress a lot of the income inequality too. Greater access to capital means greater power (human capacity is roughly talent x effort x capital), and greater power means greater capacity to tilt income flows to your favour. Which, of course, means greater access to capital, and so on…
  - Anonymous
    
    starting every human being out in life at the same level of access to capital will likely redress a lot of the income inequality too. Greater access to capital means greater power (human capacity is roughly talent x effort x capital), and greater power means greater capacity to tilt income flows to your favour. Which, of course, means greater access to capital, and so on…
    
    I’ve always favored a 100% inheritance tax, myself. But the jackbooted thugs of the rich will try to put us both up against the wall if they even hear us talking about it.
    
    Currently the first TEN MILLION DOLLARS worth of any married couple’s estate can be left to their tanned, surgically enhanced, non-working spawn. Unsurprisingly, each generation becomes more dissipated, corrupt and detached from reality.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Actually, it’s $5 million for an individual, ten for a married couple consisting of individuals of different sexes.
- Anonymous
  
  Ah, that’s great! I can’t wait for that to happen after I’m dead! I’m sure that children in sweatshops are as enthusiastic as I am! That’s the breaks, you might say only wait…. every change in workers rights has happened when people said, “no, that is not the breaks. WE DEMAND MORE!”
darth_schmoo

So the question is, how does Germany do it? They manufacture and export like crazy, despite having high wages and very powerful unions (downright tyrannical, compared to the U.S.).

During the recent recession, they managed to protect jobs very well, with unemployment only rising by half a percent. Though, in fairness, back in 2004 they were up as high as 11%.
- WalterBillington
  
  Germany does it by being amazing at what it does. Their edge is competence.
  
  I think it’s a while before the China effect dissipates completely; barring the high oil prices and their impact on shipping costs. Oooh … maybe THAT’s why the west keeps causing turmoil!
  
  Cory’s comment at #5 is philosophically valuable, but in our unfortunate capitalist world it needs more wind in the sails.
  - Anonymous
    
    wrong!
    
    germany has the european union- absorbed much, loaned more
    
    they go down as the piigs go bankrupt.
  - Anonymous
    
    Not really. Germany’s edge is sanity. I kid you not.
    There are social services for everything there, all available to even the poorest of the poor. Everyone pays scaling taxes, even those who make six figures. Education there is for more than churning out economic robots. Religion knows its place: in peoples hearts and not government. I could go on. And on.
- Anonymous
  
  Thanks darth. Germany cracks me up! I mean, they had Hitler and yet have gotten to a place with better working conditions than the US! Go figure! They went from concentration camps to a reasonable amount of vacation times?! How the heck?! Oh wait, the US is stupid. That sucks.
mentat69

I have worked with and alongside union workers for the last 20 years at two large American firms. My assessment is that Unions have done more to damage American productivity and the economy more than any other entity I can think of. Unions create perverse incentives in business and they encourage a psychology of laziness. I have personally witnessed too many people transform from enthusiastic productive people to sad negative useless leeches. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard union people say “I don’t care!” about the work they do. In twenty years I have never seen a union policy or action result in anything positive. It’s just so bad it’s almost enough to make me vote republican just so I can vote anti-union.
- Neon Tooth
  
  Obvious astroturfer is obvious.
- Oceanconcepts
  
  My assessment is that Unions have done more to damage American productivity and the economy more than any other entity I can think of.
  
  I’ve had many negative experiences with unions as well, including some that verged on criminal shakedown operations. But it’s a two-way street.
  
  Germany has very strong unions and an extremely successful manufacturing and export economy- and very low unemployment. What they don’t have is the huge differential between top corporate hierarchy (CEO pay) and the average worker, or the dysfunctional, rabidly adversarial relationship between unions and management that has characterized the US. Unions are large shareholders of many industries. Labor is highly valued- and there are technical education programs that help develop a skilled workforce. Health care is not a question. Benefits are better.
  
  No one has a perfect solution, but usually, in my experience, when workers have a bad attitude about their work, a big part of the problem comes from the top.
  - Wally Ballou
    
    IMO one of the biggest ways unions in America have shot themselves in the foot is to agree to contracts whereby all the current employees keep their existing pay scale and pension while all future employees get 2/3 the pay and a 401k.
    
    Of course, since future employees don’t get to vote on the deal, this has been a very effective, but long-horizon, union busting strategy. I guess most of the union officials figure they’ll be retired before the next generation of employees reach critical mass.
Upbeat99

Why exactly should the Western environment be less polluted than China? Once pollution has evened out, the water is gone and cancer and disease are equal, then we can fight for health.
- IamInnocent
  
  Uhum… But analogies, as seductive as they are stylistically, hardly ever apply as a good argument.
  
  If you really believe that there is any way for the Western world to remain so isolated that the living levels there can remain 10+ times better than they are in the East then, I can’t agree with you. Our living standards did constantly drop for the last 30 years and will continue to do so for some time. Those of the workers in China will rise as they already do and faster than most, especially in the West, believe it possible. Things will never become equal but they will balance out, with a degree of fluctuation, accounting for many other factors, and only if we remain competent and competitive of course.
  
  We will loose freedoms and they will gains some: so the fight will never be over, for them or us.
Rayonic

This is wage slavery and slave wagery. We should shut these factories down immediately.
- jetfx
  
  Way to straw man Cory’s point. He’s arguing that wages should go up across the board, because a race to the bottom is bad for everyone.
Anonymous

The press release doesn’t say anything about an American worker earning about the same as a Chinese worker. It says that American workers have “relatively higher” productivity, so that if you factor in this that and the other, then the effective wages you end up paying in the most expensive cities in China are “only” 30% cheaper than the cheapest places in the US. Given that it’s just a press release and no hard numbers are given, it’s a little hard to see if this is a real trend. China seems to be in a big bubble at the moment, at least in housing, so their wages are likely to go down at some point.
andrei.timoshenko

Let’s solve the problem of unemployment………………………by removing all of the things that made employment attractive in the first place!
BB

“Workers and unions are more willing to accept concessions to bring jobs back to the U.S.,” noted Michael Zinser, a BCG partner who leads the firm’s manufacturing work in the Americas. “Support from state and local governments can tip the balance.”

Feels like it was the plan all along.
bcsizemo

But people make this assumptions about China like it’s going to become some type of manufacturing powerhouse and everyone there is going to living the high life or something…

What company is going to pay a worker in China more than they are one in Vietnam, Pakistan, Indian, or any other up and coming second/third world nation? I mean companies will pack in and ship out of the US to save a nickel on a product, they will do the same if China becomes more expensive than other options.

Part of the REAL reason that manufacturing is coming back to America is the cost of shipping things all over the world. When fuel was super cheap it wasn’t that much of an issue, now with the rising cost of fuel playing a much bigger factor it’s “cheaper” to make the goods where you want to sell them.

-that and personally I believe the world/America has to many choices. You don’t need 10 different blenders or washer or whatever. You just need a couple of different models/feature sets that will last. I don’t want to have to buy a new “whatever” in a few years because the old one broke. I want to buy a new “whatever” because it’s better than what I have now.
- peterbruells
  
  Shipping – as in â€œtransporting per shipâ€ â€“ is still cheap when done in bulk. And there’s even room for improvement yet, with high-rirsing computerized sails and making use of the Northern routes.
- davidasposted
  
  You assume that the U.S. will remain the final destination for consumer goods for the foreseeable future. That seems unlikely. You ask: Why stay in China? Because there are/will be hundreds of millions more consumers than in the U.S. who have a lot of consumption catch-up to do. Why send toasters from Cincinnati (apologies to #2 GreenJello) to Shanghai and face expensive shipping costs when you could ship the same toasters from a factory in Guangzhou for much less?
  
  The U.S. is no longer the center of the world of consumer goods. You’re watching an economic and political empire in slow decline, folks. If it’s any consolation, the U.S. can make war better than any other country in the world right now. At least it can make something.
  - GreenJello
    
    [i]Why send toasters from Cincinnati (apologies to #2 GreenJello) to Shanghai and face expensive shipping costs when you could ship the same toasters from a factory in Guangzhou for much less?[/i]
    I partially agree with you. Let me put it another way, why ship toasters half way around the world in EITHER case? We don’t need just one factory producing the world’s toasters, and shipping costs are just going to continue rising.
    
    In the case of China you’re assuming that the government is going to stop deliberately subsidizing it’s industrial leaders on the backs of the working class. Until that happens the Chinese people won’t have the money to buy toasters, or anything else for that matter.
    - Ito Kagehisa
      
      Let me put it another way, why ship toasters half way around the world in EITHER case? We don’t need just one factory producing the world’s toasters, and shipping costs are just going to continue rising.
      
      Because slave labor and environmental degradation are so much cheaper than fair compensation and environmental conservation.
      
      Work your condemned political prisoners to death making shoddy products, ship them across the ocean in a filth-belching, rusty hulk and you can sell the products cheaper. Your competition has to cut down on quality just to survive, so everything ends up shoddily made.
      
      That’s today’s global marketplace in a nutshell.
      
      Hey, where is Mr. Zyodei? This seems like an argument for the invisible hand. If wages really are rising in China, and the need for labor is outstripping the supply of thought criminals, he should be able to win this one!
      - GreenJello
        
        Because slave labor and environmental degradation are so much cheaper than fair compensation and environmental conservation.
        While slave labor is cheaper, the article clearly points out that chinese wages are rising. In this case to come more in line with US wages. Further it’s been shown that China’s lax environmental enforcement (they actually have SIMILAR policy’s to the US) doesn’t effect the bottom line much, maybe 1-3%. So if the costs are similar, shipping costs becomes much more important, particularly when gas just doubled in price.
Anonymous

Products made in the USA cost more because of laws intended to prevent people being treated like slaves and laws intended to discourage wholesale destruction of the environment people need in order to live healthy fullfilled lives.

We had two choices:

1) require that all products sold in the USA were created in accordance with pre-Reagan US laws. That would push Chinese manufactured goods out of the market and reform labor practices in South American commodity and food production overnight.

2) degrade our society to the level of the cruelest and most poisonous competitor. That preserves (and even increases) existing power and wealth disparities to the benefit of the super-rich.

We have chosen option #2. Because “socialism” is evil!
arikol

One thing that is left out of the equation: Quality control.

The U.S. has not been known for the high quality of their products for a number of decades now (take the car industry for an example), while the Chinese (and the other asian countries that have been building up their manufacturing chops) have achieved an incredible quality/cost balance.
Building up low-cost manufacturing in the modern world takes much more than low wages. It requires high levels of worker training, extremely large investment in production technologies, and a lack of fear of change.

The Germans managed by figuring out that their specialty should be mechanical excellence (they went through a rough patch in the nineties after getting access to cheap labour. The drop in quality wasn’t worth the lowered wages).
The U.S. CAN become a manufacturing powerhouse, but only by having a focus which gives them some specialisation. Trying to enter a crowded market is probably not the best bet.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  the Chinese (and the other asian countries that have been building up their manufacturing chops) have achieved an incredible quality/cost balance.
  
  Outside the lead and melamine industries?
Anonymous

Soon we can have the plutocratic, classist society the right has always dreamed of. Give the suckers some cheap junk food, some guns (government always has the better ones) to make them feel powerful, and a few bones tossed at them like bans on abortion. That way they won’t notice that they are drifting to a 3rd world quality of life. If anyone dares to point this out just say they are antidevelopment and better conditions will cost people jobs even as they are cut.

Meanwhile the 1% who control everything will always live as far away from the overdeveloped land and struggling people that made them rich.

Countries are being played against each other like states in the US are by companies. It is a race to the bottom for all of us who don’t own the companies.
benher

Welcome to the new feudalism.
The wet dream of the American oligarchy is what China already has – the total subjugation of it’s (poor & uneducated) populace. Tempered with blind nationalism, naturally.

Of course, it only happens if we proles let it.
- jphilby
  
  “it only happens if we proles let it.”
  
  And that is absolutely *key* to all of the rest. So their job is make sure we can never agree what we want.
swimsy

Yay! The race to the bottom continues apace. So how long do you think a society that cannibalizes its middle class can survive?
- Wally Ballou
  
  Americans had the most prosperous and upwardly-mobile middle class in world history because?
  
  Not because we had less regulation and low govt spending (sorry righties)
  
  Not because we had higher taxes and strong unions (sorry lefties)
  
  The reasons are:
  
  For several decades, no other country except Britain, Germany, France, and Japan had any industrial base worth mentioning. And Germany, France and Japan were out of the running for a couple of decades due to some “unpleasantnesses”.
  
  And for those same decades, we had access to all the raw materials and energy we could possibly want, for dirt cheap prices.
  
  Neither of which has been true for the last thirty years. The golden age of American manufacturing, when we could sell whatever we wanted around the world at prices that gave Americans an ever-increasing standard of living, is….gone.
  - Anonymous
    
    All we’re saying is we don’t care if a golden age of manufacturing comes back, if it comes with a worse rather than a better standard of living. The things you credit may be responsible for the former, but the lefties get some credit for raising the latter, and it counts more.
turn_self_off

Apply capitalist pressures on wages to drive them to the bedrock, while at the same time “lobbying” so that the products being made are not affected by the same pressures. Gotta love it… /s
Anonymous

I was born and raised in the US, but the only time I have ever made a decent wage or had insurance and vacation was when I lived and worked in China. I have worked full-time my entire life and several years since returning to the US.

I’m not sure how this relates to this article exactly except that, FYI, I am currently thinking of moving back to China and working for my Chinese employer so that I can have decent wages, benefits, and insurance.

I am a teacher. I want to stay in the US.

That must be relevant to someone, somewhere on some issue.