How much do you think it costs to make a pair of Nike shoes in Asia?

I agree with sibling post saying both but with a note.

(Most)Shitty job conditions can only exist if there is an abundance of labor; why can fast food joints get away with irregular scheduling? If the supply of labor is tight, jobs have to add bonuses to keep workers.

Why is health insurance tied to jobs in the US? Because during WWII, the government set limits on wages so companies started adding insurance and other items to attract workers.

During the GFC, what did companies do after cutting workers? Start cutting benefits, the workers couldn't walk since no one was hiring.

Look at pensions, they went away in the 80's. If you google why they went away, the answer is 401k became availible, however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_1980s_recession

> Even the “father of the 401(k),” Ted Benna, tells The Journal with some regret that he “helped open the door for Wall Street to make even more money than they were already making.” >Other experts agree: On its blog, the Economic Policy Institute recently declared 401(k)s “a poor substitute” for the defined benefit pension plans many workers primarily relied on, which provide a fixed payout for employees at retirement, and which have now become increasingly rare. Nowadays, “just 13% of all private-sector workers have a traditional pension, compared with 38% in 1979,” reports The Journal.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/04/a-brief-history-of-the-401k-...

https://time.com/archive/6686654/a-brief-history-of-the-401k...

>And if a US shoemaker wanted to undercut the import, a Made in USA shoe that sells for $100:

Somewhere in there you have to also figure in the cost of the fact that shoe factories and the suppliers of the goods to make shoes also don't exist in the US and will cost millions, and years, to get setup.

I agree, isn't most selling online nowadays?

This also doesn't make sense because buying shoes from Nike.com costs roughly the same as Footlocker. Is Nike taking that 50% cut in this case? Article definitely hand waves away a ton of the complexity around tariffs and global trade.

My favorite line is: "Asian manufacturing in Asia produces US jobs. You go to Footlocker to buy a pair of $100 shoes because you can afford them. This creates jobs for the Footlocker employees".

It feels like people have completely flipped their views on offshoring manufacturing in the last 6 months. If you go back 10 years ago we were barraged with stories about Foxconn, corporations exploiting workers in developing nations, and scenes of abandoned manufacturing cities like Detroit. The popular view was that we needed to build our manufacturing base back up and that using developing nations to pump out cheap disposable goods was bad for everyone except giant corporations.

Now we are getting told that corporations offshoring all their labor to developing nations is good, and that the USA should not do manufacturing. This article even asserts that we will lose jobs if we produce things domestically.

I don't agree with the ham-fisted bullying approach Trump is using, but I do agree with the philosophical underpinning. Offshoring all our manufacturing is not a good long term strategy and will slowly erode the value of labor and our economy.

Things have been moving in that direction since at least 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_apocalypse

I would argue earlier as malls stopped being built by 2007....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_mall

I'm not even sure why most people want to bring manufacturing back to the US. If this was a video game with a tech tree, becoming a mostly service and consumer economy would be the final winning position. Bombing our economy to go backwards to being a manufacturing economy is only attractive if you want to turn the middle class back into serfs.