Manufacturing Jobs, Gone Forever

"deserve" has no place in a "free market" system? so ethical language has no place? that's funny. that'd mean that free-market ideology itself could not be argued, because, as i've said before, it is not an argument about the empirical world, but rather is a utilitarian argument about an ideal ordering of the empirical world that would justify itself by delivering the famous "greatest good for the greatest number"---so free market ideology is an ethical argument---just turns out that it can't justify itself by appeal to its results. so it's a failed ethical argument.

of course ethical claims have a place in socio-economic relations. they're the basis for any assessment of those relations. they're the basis for any and all politics of socio-economic relations.

so, ace, it's not that i don't understand your "argument". it's that your argument is preposterous.

 

In a competitive context two people or entities may "deserve" something, but only one will get it. Therefore "deserve" is of no significance.
In a adversarial context two people or entities may "deserve" opposing outcomes or interests, but the outcomes/interests are in conflict, one side prevails. Therefor "deserve" is of no significance.

"deserve" is il defined, who determines what is deserved? Is it the same for all under all circumstances? If a person fails to prepare do they "deserve" to fail?

I am serious, I don't get it.

 

o and ace, dear, unfortunately for me i did read the nonsense that you wrote. i told you at the outset of this exchange that i am interested in talking about the history of neo-liberal "globalization" and not about versions of the kind of market metaphysics that function to rationalize it. my position hasn't changed. i pointed to a complex of actually existing pathways whereby the political consensus that confined capitalist organization to the nation-state broke down beginning in the 1970s with the transnationalization of stock trade. you respond with some banalities about the eternal conflict between firms, wage labor and the state. you then wave your hands in the direction of unionization and its history, but obviously have no grasp on that information, so revert to more metaphysics.

the narrative goes: once ownership was transnational, the *political consensus*----which was*not* a matter of law, but rather one of assumption, not even custom, that made of the nation-state the necessary horizon of capitalist organization in much of the manufacturing sector broke down. there had been multi-national forms of production prior to that--notably petroleum--that provided a kind of alternate abstract model---but the point is that once that customary framework broke down, the assumption that union representation was anything other than an impediment to accumulation went out the window. **that** lay behind the contemporary export of the worst features of capitalist exploitation, which are re-integrated into the metropole via supply pools. so tncs have no responsibility. every once in a while they send an "auditing team"----with ample warning of course. but this sort of thing is well-documented. it should be obvious.

computer production is fully integrated into the overall trans-national, supply-pool based just-in-time system of production. lowest possible wages uber alles.

the only way place in which i agree with you, ace, is when you characterize firms as blindly amoral entities. sociopathic, one might say. how on earth one can go from there to advocating "free market capitalism" is beyond me.

 

Is "deserve" a positive ethical term? If I "deserve" your property and steal it, is that ethical?

I just thought of OJ Simpson and his attempt to "steal" his "stolen" property, did he "deserve" jail time for his crimes? Did he "deserve" his stuff back since he was trying to hide it from the civil judgement?

 

Then why did you blatantly misstate what I wrote?

 

You're wrong about jobs/overseas. They ARE being sent, not created. Revlon went from Edison, NJ to Columbia. Chrysler went from the US to Mexico (not overseas, but not HERE). Speak to anyone who worked in manufacturing for these large corporations and get the actual answers, not what you perceive them to be. Because it is a "Global Economy" doesn't mean we must emulate other countries. We should be striving to surpass them, not stooping to their levels.

And what did India change from? Abject poverty, mostly. And it really pisses me off when I have to call Verizon or BofA and get someone who a)can't understand what I am asking and b) can't speak clearly enough for me to understand. Meanwhile, I and 14 million others are sitting home waiting for an unemployment check...something is very wrong here.

You aren't "blue collar" are you? We are. Most of my friends are. Many Baby Boomers and their offspring are because technology was only for the real braniacs and visionaries (those we called "whackjobs" way back then). To suggest that someone just switch from providing products to providing services is, in way too many instances, unrealistic. Those of us in our 50's who have lost jobs have NO hope of getting hired. We worked hard for 40 years only to see everything get packed up and sent off to countries where a daily "salary" of $10 is considered wonderful. Skills with tools and machines make many of us dinosaurs. And now the US wants to make the purchase of foreign made materials for our military acceptable, putting even more people out of work.

Congress could make a few changes that, in theory, are really simple: Tax breaks to companies that hire and manufacture here and tax penalties for those who don't. But since those who don't (Nike, GE, etc.) line the pockets of lawmakers, I truly doubt anything even remotely resembling that scenario will ever happen.

 

Is being born something worthy of reward?
Is getting 60% on a test, an F worthy of reward, after-all the person got 60% correct?

In nature a lion on the hunt for wildebeest. The hunt fails, does the lion "deserve" anything from the wildebeest?

Isn't the reward what they earned? The reward then is what was agreed to?

External is someone or something looking out for you as a market participant in those instances when fraud or crime has been committed? If that is true, I think I get it - but I think your view goes beyond fraud (lie, cheat, misrepresentation, etc.) or crime. If participants come to the market as equals (and that is the expectation) I see no need for "External" if participants act in good faith.

Isn't your perception of "fairness" based on what you think is "deserved"?

 

I'm not alluding the the economy being static; I'm alluding to the fact that companies found they can up their profits and make their stockholders very happy by skipping town and taking the jobs with them. "They aren't universally closing capacity in the U.S. and opening it up in China to a 1:1 ratio" Nope. More like 1:0. A friend was offered one year in China courtesy of his employer-Boeing. Train them there, come home. The catch? No job when he got back.
You missed the point entirely re: India. Corporations again went to cheap labor when in this country, 14 million people NEED a paycheck. And most of us already know the language needed in those teleservices.
Switching jobs is not switching careers. Your first two were unskilled retail jobs (yes, restaurants are retail). What I'm saying is that all that made us enjoy what we have was designed by us, built by us for us and is no longer ours wholly. To say that someone can just up and switch directions is simply not true across the board. I did it at 50, but to do it now in this economy just is not doable. it's a double edged sword-the jobs that what were plentiful are now gone but the economy that is (partially) a result of that loss does not allow for viable changes.

 

if you want to see the early history of this process, look at bennett and bluestone's book the deindustrialization of america. this link:

http://www.d.umn.edu/~epeters5/Cst1201/Articles/Deindustrialization of America.pdf

takes you direct to a pdf from the first chapter of the book. it gives you an idea of the way the whole thing works and its time-frame. you can probably still find it in a library.

if the process was already arguably visible in the early 1980s and the academic/reactionary arguments for it were already in place, and if the consequences of it were already visible for the people affected (but not necessarily for the public that was not directly affected) how was consent manufactured for it? i mean, you'd think that there would have been Protests. but nary a peep. mostly because of the utilitarian claims made by all these markety market "experts" about how good this would all be for most people. except it wasn't and could not be. it was class warfare. the fate of working people was sheared off the main narrative. good stuff was a coming, they said. except it wasn't.

the walmart thing is a later development made possible by advances in supply-pool and other management softwares taken on by a corporation with very significant capital and expanded into a seamless, total cost-surveillance system. the same logic extends to the bogus labor practices for which they are well-known. and there's something more than passing strange about the way in which walmart---and the walmartization of retail---has managed to make of cheap goods a kind of decontextualized empirical fact, something not connected to exploitation transferred to new capitalist geographies.

fact is--and you can see it in the chapter above---in the eyes of capital for a long time now american working people have been expendable, obsolete. the remarkable thing is that so many of them have been mobilized around exactly the politics that justified fucking them over in the first place and then blaming them for it. maybe it's a kind of political stockholm syndrome.

 

I can't read Roachboy's posts, they give me a headache. (wish I was kidding, but I'm not).
Not sure how it works for other states, but in New Jersey, if you are on Unemployment, you can sign up for free for classes at your local community college as long as they are job-related and have seats available. In North Carolina, you can get retraining at a trade school or college on the state's dime( I don't think that means going for a degree, though).

 

My OP has two sources. The first one is from NPR.

During the course of a year Foxconn had double digit suicides at their plant. The workers would go to the roof and jump off. They addressed the problem.....they built a fence on the roof.

 

In the 80's we saw it coming, I remember the press was saying the US was turning more into a service jobs country than manufacturing. Our government did NADA, to prevent factories moving overseas, they raised student loans (big fucking deal, when the universities increased tuition and predatory credit cards became the norm), they cut the rest of educational aid to states, lowering our competitiveness in a changing world, we lowered our standard of living compared to the world going from #1 to the low teens and we keep falling, our infrastructure is falling apart but we can't raise taxes on the fucking rich because then they'd stop investing in the jobs they fucking ship overseas. We see an extreme schism in wealth and a shrinking middle class, we have bought and paid for GOP mouthpieces telling everyone they pay too much in taxes and that we need less government, we have asshats on the left bought and paid for by the same people and they refuse (for fear of losing their cushy ELECTED jobs and healthcare) to truly do anything. We have a president that is as dumb and is as honorable as a box of rocks and the GOP candidate most likely to be is someone who states he loves to fire people and made a fortune buying companies, laying off workers and shipping jobs overseas so he could make more.

In the 80's when we saw healthcare spinning out of control good old Ronnie boy deregulated and cut FDA spending so now we have meds that are killing people and a healthcare industry where prices are killing us, people talk about it but the ELECTED officials don't do shit to get it under control, so SS/Medicaid have to pay more, the people have to pay more and there goes the money for education and retraining the workforce and the money for SBA loans to start up and hire people. There goes the elderly raises in their SS paychecks, there goes money to rebuild the water systems, bridges and roads in our infrastructure. We have a president that won't end a God forsaken war we have no right to be fighting in, but he'll keep Bush's tax cuts alive for political reasons.

However, historically when jobs move into different sectors in the US, we have had strong leadership and people willing to invest in areas to make the switch over easier. Case in point, in the early 1900's we went from an agriculture nation to a manufacturing nation, causing an economic upheaval. We went from habadasheries and tailors and toy makers to mass marketed baseball caps, off the rack suits and conglomerate that just happened to own a toy company (i.e. Proctor and Gamble owning Parker Brothers).

The HUGE difference today is we have allowed monopolies to spring up and there is no incentive (nor market) for a new Microsoft, a new Apple, a new car company to start up. The government can't invest in the people because again that would require raising taxes on those BILLIONAIRES shipping jobs overseas and exploiting child and slave labor.

So what do we do, we turn on each other and spew out hatred and anger at our politicians and our neighbors because we don't like what they have to say or what they do. Is that constructive in ANY WAY? Hell no not for the people losing jobs and their houses and their dreams. We listen to the BS and pure hatred from multimillionaire talking heads that live in gated communities tell us how if we raise taxes on billionaires by a single digit we will lose more jobs and YOU will be paying more in taxes (which when people see taxes coming out every week or biweekly, it does seem a bit much) BUT most people get tax refunds and still complain about how much they pay, and the roads and education and healthcare and politicians and jobs sent overseas and on and on and on.....

What IS the answer? Raise tariffs on imports, put in punitive taxes to companies shipping jobs overseas to help with re-education and training while increasing tax incentives to companies that keep jobs here, socialize medicine to where government controls the prices of meds and services, get a handle on state funded college tuitions, end the war, bring our troops home and stop war profiteering, cut military spending to private companies that overcharge and sell our technology to the countries they ship our jobs to. Erase the Bush tax cuts, cut government waste, invest in the people and see what happens.