While companies are saving by moving manufacturing plants, many people (millions) in Vietnam are going to experience higher standard of living. I say it's a win win.
Aren't therefore many people (millions) in China going to experience lower standard of living?
Yeah... 'caus that worked for Mexico... can China look forward to a descent into drug traficking fueled civil war now?
Hell, even Paul Krugman doesn't label the issue as black and white. I want to remove sweat shop conditions as much as anyone, but keeping people alive through poverty takes priority.
Also, you don't fix sweat shop conditions by closing sweat shops. You just move them into the underground, where instead of shady business owners as bosses, they have shady crime bosses as bosses. The real trick, is to better sweat shop conditions.
This can even be done at Samsung/Apple's level, where they can make part of the requirement set for a contract certain workplace conditions/pay.
It has nothing to do with Libertarianism, and everything to do with Economics...
As if Paul Krugman is the pinnacle of radical thought on the issue?
He is a Keynesian -- which I guess counts for something like "far left" in the US.
"When the last tree is cut, the last river poisoned, and the last fish dead, we will discover that we can't eat money."
It wasn't about workers' rights, but something along those lines seems to fit.
When you have a country that starts to industrialize factory owners only have to offer wages twice what someone gets on the farm to get people to migrate from the communities they grew up in to the cities. As the factory owners profit from the cheap labor they spend some of the money on themselves, but also spend some of the money on building new factories and absorbing new labor. Eventually all the excess labor in the countryside is absorbed, and the factory owners have to start competing for new labor by raising wages. This is the same general pattern that happened in Britain then Japan then Korea and China, and seems to be just starting in Vietnam now. There are sometimes variations, such as the fact that rural wages were pretty high in the US due to lots of available land, or the Chinese residency permits system that artificially restricts who can move to the city and so started the rise in wages more quickly than would be "natural" at the expense of the people forced to live in the countryside. But then again the Party knows that its dissent among the people in easy marching distance of it's offices that it really has to worry about.
But getting back on track, even if the companies weren't greedy then creating new factories in Vietnam to create jobs for Vietnamese people jobs would be the altruistic thing to do. The difference would be that instead of dividends they would turn their profits into more investment so as to make development happen faster.
Probably before that hits, automation for most of the product. Eventually we will need very few people to produce any part of the product. We will automate resource extraction. Automate resource delivery. Automate resource refinement. Etc.
So this leaves us with a large population that has little point in the current economic system. So we'll get higher unemployment globally. Historically this has lead to wars, either internal or external. Marx/Hegel are right. The haves and the have-nots will duke it out. The have-nots will, like Norther American generals in the civil war, throw bodies at the haves. Eventually coming to a new equilibrium of far fewer have-nots (many are dead) and probably fewer haves. Eventually everything is owned commonly and a new society is birthed based on the idea of self actualization through experimentation.
Sound familiar ? if it works so far, why won't it work further on ?
War is always a safe prediction, but do you have a specific historical precedent for large-scale, long-term, structural unemployment? I cannot think of one.
(Subsistence agriculture is not unemployment.)
Perhaps we'll move away from consuming things that need to be manufactured and towards digital goods instead.
Once all the prospects for very cheap human labor are exhausted, the work goes to robots.
It doesn't go to higher paid humans. That future will not happen.
Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Which actually benefits us as the consumer. Would you prefer a less greedy corporation that goes where the most expensive labor is which then increases the cost of production which then increases the cost of the products you buy from said company?
Greed is what keeps prices low, and competition high.
Well, yes actually, if the higher cost of those products buys me something that I believe to be worthwhile. There's a whole bunch of stuff I am willing to pay more for, higher quality, better customer service, local ownership or representation, good labor practices, environmental concern, and on and on. I hate this idea that somehow price is the only thing that companies can compete on.
Yes? I would definitely prefer an America where there is less disposable crap, but more secure and stable domestic jobs for people, and I think most Americans would agree.
I'd replace "prices low" with "value per dollar high" or "efficiency high". Most of the replies to your comment complain about cheap products or claim higher prices are better if they come with particular outcomes. To be fair, they have a point.
However, the average commenter here doesn't have to choose between buying new work clothes and eating meat this month, so you have a point as well. So I'd generalize the sentiment to value per dollar or something similar.
Higher wages and better benefits benefit the consumer.
How do you figure? TVs are cheaper and bigger than ever - they're practically giving them away.
My understanding was that producers are pumping gimmicks like 3d and huge curved screens because there are absolutely no margins left in the commodity TV/monitor market.
For the relatively monied -- and software developers usually count among that number -- it's easy to argue that companies are too greedy, and that companies shouldn't use exploitative labour. For the lower class, paying extra so that someone in the third world can enjoy a better quality of life isn't an option.
In the end, greed will bite you back.
I don't think Vietnam can compete with China until China stops treating its workers as slaves.
