And how many people will be willing to pay a premium when the locally made products are worse quality than foreign products? It's happening right now with Chinese consumer goods (e.g. robotic vacuum cleaners), EVs, etc. Eventually there's a high possibility you won't be able to buy anything in the product category you want.
[–] ericmay 1 day ago
No clue, but there are millions. Just depends on the product.
Here are two examples. One made in France, the other in America:
[1] https://www.debuyer-usa.com
One of those pans is made in France (western) the other is made here in the US. The quality of the US pans are a bit better which is part of why they command the higher prices. But you can also buy a pan from Wal-Mart for 1/10 or 1/5th the cost. But that's up to you. You can support higher wages or you don't have to if you don't want to.
> And how many people will be willing to pay a premium when the locally made products are worse quality than foreign products?
Why are you assuming the American and locally made products are worse than foreign products? Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
> Eventually there's a high possibility you won't be able to buy anything in the product category you want.
Well for a lot of these we can just do without, but those are the kinds of things you have to figure out if you want "living wages". Wages are higher in the west so we will automate things to keep some prices low/lower and we'll just pay higher costs to support the living wages. Or we won't and then we won't have living wages. You can do things like try to raise the minimum wage or w/e but then you're just making American/western products less competitive with the cheaper foreign products. Then you'll have to implement tariffs and agree with Trump there in order to offset the wage differences.
[–] ElProlactin 21 hours ago
Origin is complicated and what gets printed on a label rarely tells the full story. You can have products that are assembled somewhere using components that are made somewhere else, products that contain raw materials from somewhere else, etc.
The assumption that "Made in America" results in higher wages for American workers is not always well-founded.
There's also the issue of fraud. Not every label is legitimate. Lying about one or two components in particular products can result in significantly higher margins, so there are a lot of incentives for dishonesty at multiple levels of many supply chains, and even the most well-meaning manufacturers can fall victim to it.
[–] ericmay 16 hours ago
Sure, but a product made entirely overseas results in 0 wages (for the manufacturing of the product) for American workers. Any company, to varying degrees of just how raw/local the product is made, which builds, assembles, manufacturers, grows, whatever a product here in the US has to hire and pay Americans an American wage. Naturally that may not be a "livable" wage (which is a loaded term but w/e) but it's still a wage that goes to Americans more than it goes to non-Americans.
We should avoid scumbag companies, American or otherwise, and we should do research into just how much a product is made in the US, but as a general rule there's no way around (until automation or something) paying more for American products and that's what you'll have to do to support American workers and American jobs.
Worker Unions have been telling us this for decades.
In the case of supply chain issues, yea, shit happens. But the supply chain issues also occur in the downstream foreign market you're buying the product from. So you can buy an American product and if it has parts that come from, say, China and you see a supply chain concern you'd have to be more concerned about the Chinese-made/assembled product because you have even less supply chain oversight.
[–] ElProlactin 16 hours ago
> Sure, but a product made entirely overseas results in 0 wages (for the manufacturing of the product) for American workers.
American brands like Apple capture the vast majority of the value of their products even when the manufacturing is done elsewhere. Final assembly, which is the type of work that is done in countries like China, Vietnam and India, makes up less than 5% of the retail price of most electronics products.
I've lived in the developing world for many years and currently live in a developing country in Asia that's experiencing one of the biggest manufacturing booms in the world. You can probably guess the country.
The problem with wanting to do all the manufacturing at home is that not all manufacturing wages are the type of wages you'd want in a developed, high-income economy. Low-skilled, labor-intensive assembly work is not a foundation for continued prosperity in a developed, high-income economy. And Westerners (Americans) don't want all the bad stuff that typically comes with it, including the pollution.
[–] ericmay 16 hours ago
True, but in that case the important part is still buying from an American company, even if the product is wholly assembled elsewhere. I didn't mean to imply you can and will only buy American made products from start to finish. Even in the case of Apple you're supporting very high American wages and the products cost more. Some manufacturing/assembly has been moved to the US.
> The problem with wanting to do all the manufacturing at home is that not all manufacturing wages are the type of wages you'd want in a developed, high-income economy. Low-skilled, labor-intensive assembly work is not a foundation for continued prosperity in a developed, high-income economy. And Westerners (Americans) don't want all the bad stuff that typically comes with it, including the pollution.
I agree with you, though I think items like clothing can be made much more costly but higher quality and with local manufacturing (like in Europe for some companies) but if we go back to the original point it was about supporting "living wages".
My point was just that where American (or western depending on your own beliefs) companies exist and make a given products (a skillet/frying pan was just an example where I knew there were a few American manufacturers), and let's assume it's not fraud or rebranding or something, you should pay more for those products if you want to support "living wages". Otherwise you can buy "the thing from China [1]" but you can't do that and also support "living wages" because from an assembly/manufacturing worker perspective there is no wage to be had because they aren't doing the job. To your point also of course you can argue that the company that's HQ'd in the US, doing the design work, with manufacturing in China also receives a lot of the profits or can capture the majority of the value of the product, but those folks are already paid corporate wages which are higher than a "living wage".
I'd also mention I suppose that not everyone can just work in an office and have people in other countries work in assembly lines.
[1] China makes incredible stuff, I don't mean to imply everything made there is cheap or something along those lines, though of course many products that Americans are exposed to are of that nature, there's nothing necessarily wrong or immoral about it.
[–] ElProlactin 14 hours ago
The amount of assembly work done in the US is absolutely miniscule. This type of work is never coming back to the US in any meaningful volume unless it can be done by robots.
> ...you should pay more for those products if you want to support "living wages".
The problem is that the average American earner cannot afford to pay what it would cost to produce consumer goods end-to-end in the US in a manner that would allow people engaged in low-skill labor to earn an American "living wage".
Americans cannot have it both ways: you cannot consume more material goods than any other group in the world and produce those goods domestically using workers earning an American living wage.
Most Americans truly don't understand the scale of their consumption. Countries in Western Europe are developed, high-income nations and many Americans couldn't fathom living a Western European lifestyle because even most Western Europeans don't consume like Americans.
[–] ericmay 14 hours ago
Well yea that's what will happen most likely. Obviously not all will come back and in what form it does will probably be different. But we don't have to focus only on Apple assembling computers since that's not the only company or industry at hand.
> The problem is that the average American earner cannot afford to pay what it would cost to produce consumer goods end-to-end in the US in a manner that would allow people engaged in low-skill labor to earn an American "living wage".
Well I think we can, we'd just have to buy fewer things but probably higher quality/more handmade/local, and then we'd have more people making more money. Personally I'm in favor of it just because I think it's a better way of life for many people (owning your own business, doing work yourself, &c.) But to your broad point, I don't disagree with you. I'm just saying this idea of a "living wage" is a farce unless Americans are willing to do what I believe you and I are both generally suggesting here. :)
[–] dyauspitr 1 day ago