1. It's difficult to manufacture competitively when a local living wage is in the upper echelons of global wages.
2. It's often cheaper to manufacture something semi-manually (e.g. 80% automated) than invest in buying and maintaining full automation.
If corporations could not have moved operations offshore to exploit workers and the environment in other countries for lower cost, then they would not have. They were permitted to.
Where the old "labor costs did killed it" canard really falls over is when you look at primary industry and things that physically can't be packed up and moved off shore in western countries. Mining, farming, forestry, fishing, things like that. Traditionally a lot of those industries have had high labor input costs too. They miraculously didn't all fall over like manufacturing though.
Labor costs are a cost, same as compliance with other workplace regulations and environmental laws of course. They are not the reason manufacturing was offshored though, they are the reason that corporations bribed treasonous politicians to allow this offshoring to occur with no penalty. As I said.
Mining has been dropping since the 80s [0].
Farming, forestry, fishing are estimated to decline by 3% in the next 10 years [1]. After having fallen from ~50% of the US population in 1870 already.
It's cheaper to do things where labor is cheaper, then ship them around the world by sea.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUBN212W200000000#:~:tex...
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Farming-Fishing-and-Forestry/Agricul...
I think the cost of labour now is kind of irrelevant. It was the cost of labour (and China being a stable country with favourable rule of law) that drove offshoring in the 90s and 2000s. The Chinese manufacturers chose to invest in process improvement and automation rather than just chasing the cheapest labour - and so now they've got a massive technical advantage.
I'm having a hard time parsing this. Also, source?
> The cheapest labor in the world is found in Africa and yet Western industrial manufacturing has largely ignored the continent. The price of labor isn't the most important factor here.
... Yeah this seems fair. I think a lot of Africa has an infrastructure problem - it doesn't matter how cheaply you can manufacture if you can't move large volumes of raw materials/parts to the factory and finished goods from the factory. Plus many areas in Africa have security issues which make them less attractive places to do business. Geographically, a lot of the continent is cursed with hard to navigate rivers as well (the upper Nile being an exception), so only coastal shipping is really viable.
