The Trump administration’s tariff scheme appears less and less likely to bring manufacturing jobs back to U.S. shores.
Businesses across the country are crunching the numbers and realizing that, despite Donald Trump’s insistence, they can’t balance out his tariff hikes across the supply chain.
“Some manufacturers who had plans to open factories in the country say the new duties are only adding to the significant obstacles they already faced,” Bloomberg reported Friday.
That’s because the supply chain to produce those goods in the United States simply isn’t there, requiring companies to import raw materials and factory equipment—which Trump’s tariffs have made unaffordable—from abroad.
Before Reaganomics and globalism the middle class was strong and built on the shoulders of blue collars, why do you think they forced globalism down our throat? So they could make stuff cheaply and could eradicate the middle class. I hate Trump and what he stands for, but globalism was something the left was fighting against back in the day because the left realized the consequences of losing manufacturing jobs in first world countries.
What made those jobs available was economic opportunity, investment, building a greater whole over time. You don’t win a game of checkers by knocking over the board or a race to the bottom to become the next third world poverty labor. You win with a focussed strategy to push one checker to the other side and “king” it.
Biden was taking the right approach with the chips act , infrastructure spending, and renewable energy investments. Maybe it wasn’t flashy or loud or immediate, but would have actually built a dominant position in new technologies, including us supply chain and lots of us jobs. The biggest flaw was we needed to stick to the plan for a decade or two, but that’s what you gotta do.
And what made those jobs unavailable was saying that we could now simply import all that they made from Asia instead.
You’re missing the point. That didn’t happen overnight. We gradually built supply chains in Asia to our own detriment over decades.
Sure there needs to be some sort of market or policy change if we want it to be economically plausible to bring more of it back, but then it will take decades to build out.
And there won’t be millions of unionized blue collar jobs as it will be all automated. Automation has done more to erode those jobs than outsourcing, and that genie is not going back in the bottle.
From an historical perspective it very much did happen overnight, in the 70s they were there, in the 90s they were gone
What made those jobs great for the middle class wasn’t the fact that they were blue collar manufacturing jobs, it was the fact that they were unionized.
Unions and high top tax brackets built the American middle middle class between the fourties and the eighties. Yes, offshoring allows companies to seek lower wages elsewhere, but the solution to that is not sweatshops at home. You need to start by building up strong labour rights and investing in education and infrastructure, which drive investment in job growth. Stop trying to regain all the jobs you lost and work and improving the jobs you have.
Yes, leftists have been warning about globalisation for decades, and they’re right, but lets not pretend that what Trump is doing is even in the same continent as a solution.
It’s still good jobs for people who won’t go to university, you can’t tell these folks “just learn programming” when what they’re good at is manual work.
I worked at four US manufacturing gigs before landing at an Employee Owned Company that actually paid living wage ($19/hr to start with benefits).
Prior to that, these four manufacturing companies I was hired at paid minimum wage, you were lucky to get a ten cent raise after a year. The work was grueling, health insurance was basically nothing, no paid time off, just shit conditions with mandatory overtime and zero workers’ rights.
Not to mention something like injection molding or QA off a line and into a box, is the most boring work there is. I hate injection molding. Even the aerospace department at my decent paid EO company was repetitive boring work, but at least they cared about ergonomics an employee well-being. This is not true in the majority of manufacturing.
There are some decent manufacturing jobs in the US, but the ratio of decent paid “good” ones, to shit companies who just beat every ounce of labor out of you before you destroy your body to pay you pennies is not great. Worker Unions and Employee Owned companies are where it’s at, but there is less of them than shit manufacturing companies beholden to their white collar, red tie shareholders.
Edit, for expamle, I actually got laid off by a company making car parts two weeks before Christmas. I was just temping there, had been four months. They told me they really liked my work, I was one of the better employees (wasnt hard at this place, the night shift all drank on the job and half the day folks didn’t give af). I wasnt going to stay with the company anyway, I just needed work for that winter. So they complimented my work ethic and skill, and then told me, a 26 year old single mom to one, that they had to lay me off because they couldnt afford to hire me until the new year, sorry its just before Christmas. This company was running more than half the year in the red.
Annoying as hell. I went back to the temp agency and they found me a job for a different company just for two weeks, cutting back scrap for this other company. I said sure. This new company was the employee owned one. I got lucky, one of the guys in the department was on thin ice already, so when it came out he was sharing a disgusting misogynist nickname for both me and the only other female (engineer) in the department, he got fired as his last strike. Guess who swooped in to take his job? Guess who got to smuggly tell the staffing agency there was no fucking way I was going back to the car parts place when they asked about me in January :)
Guess what happened with all good manufacturing jobs?
Globalization sent them elsewhere, labor conditions didn’t need to be competitive anymore, unions were destroyed through propaganda.
Without globalization those jobs would have stayed in the first world.
they also saw reagan was a easy to manipulate stooge, especially after his alzheimers starting to affect him, they took even greater advantage of him.
All socialist ideologies are globalist.
“Workers of the world unite” ring any bells? “All war is class war?” Globalist rhetoric. The idea that artificial divisions like nations are weapons against the people.
You are, ironically, using the word the way Reagan and his kind used it, as an ill-defined nationalist slur to protect local profit margins.
There’s a difference between fighting together against capitalism and being pro economic globalization. Economic globalization has actually hurt the workers of the world and you know full well that’s what I’m talking about, you just want to argue for the sake of arguing.
https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=umiclr
Because only white Europeans deserve to have the benefits of an industrial or post industrial economy, obviously.
Go tell a kid making Nike shoes that he’s benefiting