Reuters: “Global minimum wage”
http://www.reuters.com/subjects/global-minimum-wage
I’m not sure free trade Republicans can make headway using this.
Conclusions:
1. In 1979, even toys were made in the USA. That ship sailed long ago. So did radio and TV manufacture, and textiles (moved from Northeast, to South (”docile labor”) then offshore). So, yes a lot of it moved away (China etc.)
2. There’s still a manufacturing base in the USA. But there’s lots more automation now. So fewer human beings needed.
3. Said human beings with HS degree or less could make a decent living in US manufacturing back in the day. Now they have to work in low paying service jobs—or the netherworld of crime.
In before the buggy whip reference.
Manufacturing jobs are down 7,300,000 since 1979.
But, how many technology bad information jobs are we up since 1979?
Intel’s CEO, 2007:
“The U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business, Otellini said, that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe—this is the bitter truth.”
As a result, he said, “every business in America has a list of more variables than I’ve ever seen in my career.” If variables like capital gains taxes and the R&D tax credit are resolved correctly, jobs will stay here, but if politicians make decisions “the wrong way, people will not invest in the United States. They’ll invest elsewhere.”
Take factories. “I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States,” Otellini said
The rub: Ninety percent of that additional cost of a $4 billion factory is not labor but the cost to comply with taxes and regulations that other nations don’t impose.
(Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers elaborated on this in an interview with CNET, saying the problem is not higher U.S. wages but antibusiness laws: “The killer factor in California for a manufacturer to create, say, a thousand blue-collar jobs is a hostile government that doesn’t want you there and demonstrates it in thousands of ways.”)
The company that I work for has doubled the headcounts of their 3 manufacturing plants within the last 7 years. Nothing but insane growth in this industry (automotive supplier). I’ve been recruiting Mechanical and Electrical Engineers non-stop for half a decade.
Why bother to work??
FREE Medicaid, 60 Million people and
more millions becoming eligible under Obamacare
FREE Food stamps for 48 Million
$800/month family of 4
FREE Breakfast & Lunch at schools
FREE Rent subsidy
FREE Heat subsidy
FREE or Subsidized Obamacare (87% who joined)
FREE Obama phones
FREE Contraceptives
FREE Mammograms
FREE Abortions
FREE Pre-natal care & delivery
FREE Transportation to medical facility
FREE Translators for non-English speaking
FREE Lawyers for the indigent
FREE Pell Grants
FREE Daycare
FREE CASH! Under the Family
Independence (FI) program the takers
are given a charged debit card.
Supplementary Social Security checks
for senior immigrants even if they have
never worked 1 hour in USA.
Actually, if you look at the graph, the sharpest decline was during the GWB years, and it’s been climbing slowly since 2009. What’s up with that?
While I'd rather have things manufactured in the US, the unions screwed up everything. Remember all the strikes that would automobile manufacturing...and result in much more expensive cars when the factories opened up again?
Destroy unions, and then bring back manufacturing to the US.
We can thank NAFTA , the WTO and free trade.. this is why there is no “recovery” from the recession.. In recessions past when demand returned industry recalled ... no more. Now if there were to be recalls they would be in 3rd world countries ...not here
We now have Bush Sr’s “New World Order
All we need to do is print more money and everybody will be happy-happy-happy!
bookmark
A huge change since the 1970’s is the increased used of computer-controlled machines. What used to take an army of workers to assemble an automobile or even do underground coal mining now takes 1/3 the number of workers, thanks to robots that can do repetitive or dangerous work. As such, in the industrialized world, birth rates are rapidly falling, and even the more advanced Muslim countries—normally known for high birth rates—are seeing rapid falls in this statistic.
We are so screwed.