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To: bray

I will go on, because it is important.

You wrote this:

"Why doesn't your company raise the price of it's product 20% and increase it's margins? It can't because industry is always a slave to the market."

That is true, but it only works if there are substantial market players who are not playing by the rules. Gasoline companies have all hiked their prices to $3.00 a gallon, a previously unheard of number. How could they do that? Because the whole market moved. The cost of labor is an input to ALL comparable goods. Take chickens. Perdue and Tyson Foods compete. They use lots of cheap labor. It is true that if Tysons stopped using Mexicans and started using transported urban Americans, the costs would go up. If Perdue didn't, the 20% price differential would be felt.

However, if the national policy closes the borders and starts enforcing labor laws on the big employers, neither will be able to hire large numbers of illegals. Both will have to hire unemployed American labor, or legal immigrants, and the prices will go up in the entire sector. Americans will not stop eating chicken, so they will have to pay higher prices...unless, of course, they can get the product cheaper from somewhere else, which brings us to your next point:

"In a worldwide market many of those businesses would be closing their doors or like many, move to other countries where labor is cheaper. Labor intensive industry requires low wage laborers."

There are many aspects to this issue.
One is: if the American labor pool is not there to operate chicken factories in the US, rather than breaking the law and IMPORTING workers into the US, with all of the problems that causes, why not simply ship that industry to Mexico? The headquarters will remain here, but the industry itself will be abroad. The American labor force is not sufficiently large to be able to legally provide the work, so offshore that industry, and you won't be putting AMERICANS out of work, will you? You'll be putting illegal alien Mexicans out of work.

Ah, but offshoring to low wage areas has its own problems, doesn't it? China is certainly low wages, but whatever you build in China, if it is successful, will be stolen or substantially impaired by the Chinese government. One of the reasons companies remain in America is because of the stability of law which does not exist elsewhere. The higher prices they pay for remaining in the USA are, partly, the payment of a "governmental insurance premium" - that's simply the cost of living in a place with a developed infrastructure where your factory won't be stolen by corruption as soon as it turns a profit. Some businesses will take the chance overseas, and some will profit, but others will discover that the extra margin they make on cheap labor is completely devoured, and then some, by the corruption and pilferage of local government.
Anywhere that has a really robust rule of law and property rights is a more expensive place to operate, and for that reason. And businesses, by paying more, are paying a premium for their security. Most think it's worth it.

The bigger picture is that keeping a factory open in the United States which has to rely exclusively upon imported labor to operate, because there is no available labor pool in the US to do it, is very expensive for America. You are not producing many American jobs, but you are imposing a heavy burden of social expenditures, not to mention crime and other problem, because poor immigrants have lives outside of work, and families, and poor areas have the greatest social problem. Now, businesses that operate what amounts to large workhouses for foreigners on American soil inflict substantial costs on communities and the country at large through all of these social costs, but they free ride. The taxpayers bear the burden disproportionately while the company reaps the profit AND gets the benefit of the strong protections of American labor law.

Bottom line: if there aren't enough American workers to man these labor-intensive workhouses, what benefit is it to have them in the United States at all? They SHOULD be abroad, so that the social problems and heavy social expenses of the American welfare, health and education structure as applied to these workers' families is not borne by the US taxpayer.

However, as I mentioned in my last post, I think there ARE enough American workers to do these jobs, and so then we come to a different matter: shifting employment offshore that Americans would do, while there is substantial unemployment in America, because cheaper labor can be found offshore. Right now, the tax code allows companies to deduct the costs of labor, including offshore labor. And so (assuming I am right that there ARE adequate American laborers to do these jobs, provided they are properly paid) the American taxpayer is literally subsidizing, through the tax code, the shipping offshore of US jobs. I think that has to stop. Offshore labor can be cheaper. But is it cheaper than American labor if you cannot deduct the cost of such foreign labor from your income tax? Probably not.

Now, in theory, the companies themselves could ENTIRELY move offshore, so that Tyson Foods could not just send its chicken factories to Indonesia, but move it's whole corporate offices out of the United States to.
But that absolutely will not happen.

It will not happen because the skilled labor, executives, etc., will not go. Indonesians can be found to sex and slaughter chickens, but they cannot be found to operate Tysons foods corporate. Americans will not move en masse to the jungles of Indonesia, or to Mexico, or to China, or anywhere except, perhaps, Europe (where, however, costs are higher than the US) in order to run a chicken company. Without the high-skilled labor, the company will collapse abroad, and whatever company set itself up in the US in its place would get all the skilled labor.

You can offshore piecework, but you can't, yet, offshore the white collar work to anywhere that it's less expensive.

That too may be changing, however. India speaks English and has the common law. There is no reason why all legal work other than local litigation could not be offshored to law mills in India, and why all of the management of major companies could not be done in India, using Indians.

Of course were legal work, for example, to even start to be offshored, massive legal impediments would be raised to it by law. Start to really have a free market where SKILLED foreign labor can put the FRONT office out of work - because Indian executives and lawyers are as well, or better, educated and talented and aggressive as American execs, but a lot cheaper - and suddenly "reasonable" legislation will appear that makes an exception to THAT sort of offshoring.

The global market is regulated, and taxed, and tax codes and regulations, in addition to labor and resource costs, drive it. I think that the difference between our viewpoint may come down to a matter of FACT: whether or not there is adequate legal labor in America that can do the jobs that illegals do.


3,540 posted on 05/19/2006 4:49:55 PM PDT by Vicomte13 (Aure entuluva!)
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To: Vicomte13

Amazing how you are so willing to close entire industries rather than hire cheap labor. Your premise is right though, either we react and compete with the rest of the world and it's labor advantages or let our labor intensive industry go overseas. That is the basis of the World Economy whether or not we like it or not.

Why do you care about the mix? If we have all Asians who cares as long as we get the job done. The fact is the Turd world is right across the Rio. Using this labor only makes sense because we are overqualified for most of these jobs.

You also say that Americans are willing to pay more for American workers. Tell that to Ford and GM or walk through your house and see how much say made in China.

Pray for W and Our Troops


3,553 posted on 05/19/2006 9:19:46 PM PDT by bray (The only thing lower than Bush' numbers are the press')
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