Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
If cost of labor were the only consideration, you might have a point. You're also failing to grasp that if you make the workers more efficient, then they become worth employing domestically instead of moving the jobs elsewhere.
"We have a vastly more efficient method of making widgets, gentlemen!"
"Great, we can keep those jobs in the US!"
"Well, if we use that method in China, we can get stupid rich!"
"China, it is!"
"Except that the new widget machine requires highly trained people to maintain it. And there aren't any in China. And it requires parts that will cost 10x as much to ship to China. And it requires that we build a new factory in China, complete with power and transportation infrastructure, which will cost 10x more than it would to simply install in our existing facility. So we could save a million dollars a year in labor costs, but will have to pay a billion dollars in start up costs to realize that. So yeah, we'll make our investment in this China deal in about a thousand years. Oh, and sir, the design for the new widget machine is proprietary and worth 100 thousand times more than the labor savings will ever be, and if we put one in China anywhere, they'll just steal it and we'll be dealing with their own companies using our equipment to out produce us in a year or so".
"Oh! Let's not do that then".
I just freaking finished saying that if labor costs were the only consideration, you'd have a point. But it's not. You do understand that the very factors in an area that make the labor dirt cheap, also make installing, maintaining, and operating expensive high tech equipment very very expensive, right? Well, no, you obviously don't. So consider this me informing you of this fact.
Do you know how long it takes to get a freaking forklift in India? Or how long it takes to run electricity to a building? Or how hard it is to keep wild monkeys out of your data center (no, I'm not making this up).
Quote:
[If you think otherwise....brain damage, etc.
In this case, thinking otherwise shows that I understand the realities of attempting to operate high tech devices in "cheap labor" areas of the world far better than you do. This is where the US has a massive economic advantage in and which can be utilized to create jobs in the US, but this is the one thing that pro-labor folks keep trying to attack. Which I find completely insane. The only thing that makes the US worker a more viable economic choice in many industries is that we can take advantage of tech and infrastructure here in the US that is not economically viable elsewhere. Certainly, not in the super low labor markets that most pro-labor folks complain about.
The brain damage approach is thinking that we can compete with cheap labor by using the same exact processes they do, only paying our labor 10x as much. I'm not sure how that makes any sense at all to anyone. We must continue to make process improvements in how we use labor. Otherwise, we *will* lose to the "pay them a few pennies a day and a bowl of rice" labor markets. If we're making products the same way that cheap labor guy somewhere else does, with the same equipment and same overhead, we lose. Period.
I get that this doesn't match the simplistic narrative most pro-labor folks want to use, but it is a fact. We win by having better workers who produce more per hour of labor, and thus can support a higher labor cost. And workers are made "better" in this context by one of two methods: Better training/skill, and/or better equipment that acts as a labor output multiplier. Arguing that we should not utilize the second method because some of the older less productive jobs might be lost is a terrible idea. Those jobs will be lost over time anyway. Better to replace them with more productive jobs that can compete, then just lose them and get nothing in return.