I've heard quite a bit lately about how Americans are losing jobs to foreigners and I certainly appreciate the concerns of people who say that. After all, many manufacturing jobs are going overseas, the trade deficit keeps going up and it seems like Americans can't compete against cheap, foreign labor. That's all well and good, so I'd like to give you an opportunity to fix that situation. It's called coming to my house and mowing my damn lawn.
That's right, bring that Toro out to my house and get that grass cut. After all, if you want to keep foreigners from getting American jobs, you can start by replacing the two gentlemen who currently mow my lawn every Tuesday. After all, I'm willing to guess that they don't come from the US originally.
Anyway, the biggest problem with American workers is simply the fact that they make more than most workers. What this means is that their rate per unit of work is much greater than a person working in China, India, Pakistan or any of a host of other, less-developed countries. In fact, it is so much cheaper that companies in the US can send their work overseas, have it completed, then have it sent back at a much lower cost than one would get from giving the work to folks in the States. While that is certainly a tribute to the power of globalization and fast, cheap shipping, it also shows just why the US isn't manufacturing a whole hell of a lot.
Manufacturing is, after all, mostly the realm of unskilled labor. The machines do most the work these days, while people do a little bit of finishing work in order to complete the piece. Thus, machinery is powerful and people are simply idiots doing some minor last-minute work. As a result, it's a lot more cost effective for Nike to have the Vietnamese run their assembly line, rather than to have Americans pushing their overpriced shoes from one assembly station to another, then send them across the largest ocean in the world in order to sell them to idiots who think that $5,000 shoes are somehow going to improve their jump shot.
Anyway, the problem here is that companies are designed to make money and they can make a hell of a lot more money by shipping their work overseas in order to get it done fast, well, and cheap. Thus, overseas workers are the key to helping American corporations deliver goods that will actually be bought by Americans and by people in other countries who don't make as much money as us fat Americans.
If people were willing to pay extra in order to get goods that were made in America, that would be one thing. However, since people are all about getting more for their dollar (especially with the economic slowdowns of the past 5 years or so) they want goods that are inexpensive. Thus, Americans are forcing American companies to manufacture goods in other countries. Thus, American companies are forced to manufacture their goods overseas in order to produce goods that people will buy.
However, that is not to say that Americans cannot compete in many markets. Where they do well in is the market for high-quality merchandise. Products like trucks, airplanes, and farming and construction equipment. The sorts of goods that demand high-quality workers who will turn out high-quality products. Let's face it, nobody is going to care if their salad shooter is on the fritz, while people will care if their airplane is acting a little funny. Thus, people who purchase goods that they need to know they can count on will purchase American products.
Notice, however, that I do not include automobiles in this list. This is, of course, because Americans are used to buying cheap cars instead of good ones. There used to be some sort of idea that cars are something to be replaced every 3-5 years, instead of keeping a car that will last for 10-12 years or more. Of course, this is one reason why nobody outside of the US wants to buy American cars, since they are absolute crap. I sure don't buy American cars. Everybody I knew in college who had an internship with one of the Big Three said that their cars were filled with shoddy parts in order to keep prices low. And that is just stupid. So if GM, Ford or Chrysler wanted me to buy one of their cars, they would turn out a model that gets good gas mileage and isn't a piece of shit.
A sports car that was designed to do something known as "turning" would also be a nice bonus, but I think American car companies would rather stop selling cars altogether rather than sell one whose steering wheel works.
The next problem, of course, is that all the tech jobs are leaving the country and moving on to places like India. Personally, I am not surprised by this, because much of computer science is no longer a profession so much as it is a trade -- like welding or automobile maintenance. If you don't believe me, take a look at the ads these days. "Get your certification today and make more money tomorrow!" Computer certification... not unlike a welding certificate, wouldn't you say?
Of course, this does not take into account programming, which is a different animal altogether. Of course, many of the programming jobs are also leaving the country, since India, China and Russia are all turning out some solid coders. Well, yeah! These are some smart people. They can learn how to program too. And they do it cheaper than Americans. In fact, a recent programming contest left American universities far in the dust, as the top prizes went to universities in Asia and Russia. Big hairy deal.
In case nobody noticed, many of the best programmers in the U.S. don't go to college. Instead, they tend to get programming jobs during college and never complete their degrees. Or they get computer jobs out of high school and never even go to college. In fact, many of the best programmers actually look down on people with college educations, since they took four years (or six, in my case) to learn less than these people learned from just sitting in front of a computer and learning to do it themselves. Compare this with other countries that will actually require people to go to college (and that may be the first time they spend much time with a computer, since computers are expensive) in order to even work with a computer, much less program one.
Of course, it is not really that necessary to have good programmers any more, since hardware is usually far outpacing software's ability to tax it. Developers are usually building their programs on the same boxes every day and it takes years to create new, powerful programs. Even if there are mistakes in the program that make it take too long to run, the processors are usually able to cover these mistakes and make them into non-issues.
As well, the systemization of programming methods (ISO 900X) is making the quality of programmers more of a non-issue also, as people simply do what they are told and the product is released. There are workers and there are artists and systemization rewards workers. Meanwhile, a person who has elevated their programming skills to an art is really not that important, since their ability to pack a lot of code into a small piece of memory is not as valuable as it was in the days when 64K of memory was considered enormous.
The only exception to this is in console games, where the system specs are fixed for years at a time, but people want bigger and more powerful games constantly. Thus, console gaming is one area where the great coder is better than the merely good one. And console games are still made all but exclusively in the US and Japan, where the worker prices are high. See how this works?
Of course, there are ways to answer America's inability to produce goods. The first answer is, of course, robots. Robots work cheap, they don't mind lousy working conditions and they can be packed into an area that doesn't need adequate fire escapes. Thus, if someone built a textile plant in Atlanta and all that cotton grown in Georgia was shipped by truck rather than by ship to the manufacturing plant, it would make things much cheaper. In addition, the cheaper shirts and jeans could be exported to other countries, which would help the trade deficit, and alleviate America's dependence on Chinese and Pakistani textile mills. But corporations aren't going to do that, since that would require an outlay of capital, and it seems that American companies have no interest in making things cheaper in the long run by paying money now. See the rail companies' resistance to installing automatic couplers before the government mandated them if you want a good example. Only after they installed them did they realize that they were much cheaper than killing people who were coupling trains by hand.
However, let us take a more philosophical view of globalization. For instance, let us think about the fact that it is causing American jobs to go overseas. Apparently, this is supposed to be a bad thing. However, I am wondering when charity and helping others less fortunate has ever been a bad thing?
Has anybody noticed that the U.S. is the world's richest country and we have more money than we know what to do with? And this has allowed us to buy a bunch of worthless shit that has been churned out by factory workers in China and Pakistan and Malaysia and dozens of other countries where people could use the money to do things like buy food. I think this is an improvement over a nation of subsistence farmers, don't you? Oddly enough, I'm not against the idea of other people having some cash in their pockets, though it seems that this sentiment is thought to be the worst thing to ever happen to the Second and Third Worlds.
Yes, we know that people in Vietnam are toiling for long hours in unsafe conditions as they churn out more crap that they can't afford. However, has anybody thought that there is a country that already did this? Let's see, what is that country? Something, something, oh yes! The United States.
In case you forget, the U.S. put workers through hell so that those workers could ensure their children would have better lives. Yes, it took a lot of time and a lot of work, but it was only after running through the gauntlet that the U.S. came out the other side with child labor laws and fire codes and minimum wages and a lot of other things that have made working much better. But it was on the backs of a lot of orphans and men who worked 20-hour days 7 days a week that we have this prosperity we don't want to share with the rest of the world. Seems like we should be a little more forgiving of other countries that are willing to go through that same process in order to build their economies. Of course, they are all making shit for us, so when their workers get too expensive, don't worry! We'll just move on to Africa and leave them reeling, much like Japan's economy. And won't that make you feel better, knowing that they have been freed from servitude?
Well, on the whole that was a decent job, though the two Hispanic gentlemen who used to stop by would do it in about 30 minutes, instead of the four hours it took you. So, I guess it's time to settle up. $5 an hour sounds sufficient, since that's about what I was making with my copywriting business. Don't you think that's fair?