What Chinese bosses think of American workers
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
So instead of Americans owning American companies, and employing 100% American labor, most of the factories have shut down, and the ones that are left are owned and operated by the Chinese and employ a large fraction of foreign workers, although not a majority. How on Earth is this better? The globalists at The Atlantic have clearly outdone themselves with this backwards logic.
Ceteris paribus, China's size means it has a larger market, more competitors and therefore a larger market share.
Economically it's superior. If a robot, or a Chinese factory, can produce goods cheaper, why not take advantage of it? Cheaper goods benefit everyone. The pie isn't finite. A more efficient economy means a bigger pie, not fewer slices.
This is the free market in action. It has dictated people want chinese goods more at their price point than american goods at theirs.
The overall quality of life worldwide has gone up. 96% of the world's population - 7.2 billion people are not American.
If you are a human being you should be happy humanity is better rather than selfishly worrying about the 4% of the world whose lives improved less than the rest.
If globalization is needed so badly to lift the world, we need to find a way to change it in a way that doesn't destabilize us in the process.
Thats an unrelated issue that much of the rest of the world has solved a long time ago.
If healthcare in America has shown anything it's that Americans will proudly throw other Americans under the bus if it suits themselves.
I'd question whether the people you are prioritising care about you at all.
Yet, you somehow focus on people living within artificial boundaries created by your government.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/0...
Well, in many cases (but not all of course), people who put "country" first, get much better outcomes in the end. In fact, if you look at the poor half of the world -- it's where everybody mostly put themselves first.
So I argue that for the best life quality, there should be some balance between the two. Although figuring out the best balance is a very hard problem.
this is easy to say until it's your family's livelihood.
Have you seen the elephant graph? [0] The reason people are upset is not because they are selfish, it's because the people above them are. The wealthiest of the wealthy 0.1% have profited immensely, the lower half of the world's population has been lifted out of poverty, and this has all come at the expense of the American blue collar worker. Factories have closed, the opioid epidemic has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and everybody is calling these suffering people selfish and lazy. It's no wonder they want to give everyone the middle finger and vote for Trump.
[0] http://voxeu.org/article/greatest-reshuffle-individual-incom...
Correlation doesn't mean causation. The blue collar workers of America have lost purchasing power. That is a fact. Chinese factory workers are better off, that's another one. But blue collar workers from other countries are better off than their American counterparts. How's that possible?
Health care, education, name it and you will see that don't work anymore. War again drugs, a complete disaster. But that's because the 0.1% stopped paying their fair amount of taxes and have converted the public services into their own private business in name of a "small government" while these same rules don't apply to them because they are "too big to fail". And has nothing, or little, to do with Chinese factory workers. Americans have voted for their own government to not help them anymore. It is not just poor people that suffer that lack of services but all the general population, except for the 0.1% that has money to pay for it all.
America have grown a lot in this past years, redistribution of wealth has failed. The 0.1% talks about not wanting a "class warfare" while fighting one.
Everything is linked in the economy. When I say that it's come at the expense of these workers, I don't mean somebody made the call to take money from them and give it to Chinese workers. I mean that in the grand game of musical chairs, they are the ones who have been left standing.
I am a supporter of single payer health care and vastly reduced tuition (or the elimination of the university's role in modern society, but that's another conversation), but I also like the idea of freedom to travel and open borders, and I've never found a way to square the two. I used to burn with envy when I read that such and such writer or artist moved to Paris from the US like it was no problem at all - how was it possible 100 years ago but not now? France offered fewer protections then, and had less to lose from letting people in.
About two months ago, it was the beginning of a weekend and there were no clinics open that would see me until the coming Monday. Something was rapidly deteriorating the skin on my hands. So I called an advice line, and the nurse on the line said that I should go to an emergency department. So I went to an emergency department, waited a few hours and was then seen by a doctor who could not diagnose me. She gave me a prescription for a week course of antibiotics and a topical cream, and said that a dermatology office would call me over the next week. I filled the prescription on my (thankfully exceptionally good) employer drug coverage. I followed the prescription regimen for the week and did not hear from the dermatology office, thankfully the cream was enough to apply according to the directions for up to a month and was seemingly keeping the deterioration of my hands at bay. I waited another two weeks for the dermatologist to call, and they did not. I called the hospital and was connected to a representative which did not speak or understand English very well and ended up being connected to the wrong department; then I called the hospital again and the lady at the hospital connected me with the dermatology office which was to receive my referral. After about 25 minutes I was able to deduce that the ER had not yet faxed the referral to the dermatology office, so I called the ER and thankfully still had my discharge form on hand to reference and help them track down the referral. I made sure they faxed the referral, and confirmed with the dermatology office which told me that I would be scheduled for about Tuesday last week (and would receive a call when it was confirmed). I still haven't heard from the dermatologists and I'll probably have to nag them again. I'm currently attempting to treat the condition by myself by reading random articles and blogs, and medical research on Baidu Wenku (thank god for high IQ) and doing okay, though it's not eliminated.
For critical/emergency care, Canada's system often works quite well (though sometimes fails horribly). If you have anything less than an emergency, or need dental work or drugs, you need your own insurance. That said, the fields which are still private in Canada (lasik, dental, optical) are reasonable to pay for by yourself if you're middle class. The fields which are covered by government insurance are illegal to pay for by yourself.
Americans[1] is not the same as Americans[3], there is some overlap (in the sense that Americans can own shares in US companies) but Americans[1] are mostly aristocrats, and whether those aristocrats live in New York or Shanghai shouldn't matter much to Americans[3].
Besides that, "most of the factories have shut down" is false, American manufacturing hasn't shrunk, it just employs less people and more capital. Most Americans ([1] and [3]) work in the service sector now. This is a change that is orthogonal to the nationality of factory owners, and is coming to China soon enough.
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/..., https://hbr.org/2009/09/nummi-what-toyota-learned, https://consumercal.org/toyatanummi-blue-ribbon-commission-w...
Urban Missouri and urban Virginia are essentially identical culturally, and the rural areas of each state are very similar. I haven't been an immigrant from abroad in either state, but I'd expect the experiences of those once arrived in USA to be fairly similar as well.
It's good for the local economies that the larger companies (GM, etc) create the effect where foreign investors see opportunity in these feeder companies as labor costs back home begin to rise making these investments attractive.
It speaks to their commitment to making their investment work that they are only 15% behind in productivity given the "handicaps" of different work ethic, skills, pay and regulation.
I don't believe this assumption is correct. There are plenty of cases where US bosses are fully capable of adjusting to inexistent labor laws and abusive labor practices.
If US bosses are quite capable of adjusting to other jurisdictions, why do you assume that Chinese bosses aren't?
This is because the US has been able to provide these types of jobs for the majority of the population for many generations. What is a sinecure from the global perspective is normal from the US perspective.
Being able to consistently trade time for money is the core sinecure belief, the lack of risk is key. This is only possible in highly controlled almost game like situations. The "real world" requires proof of value and often a lot of risk.
A pet theory if mine is that many American companies use off shoring to continue to provide sinecure benefits for their important workers while lowering costs. Those workers don't see it as such as they already have sinecures in this model. The offshoring is necessary for company survival.
The learning and adjustment curve will be difficult, but I hope both parties can navigate it well and prosper.
Similarly "work for" should be changed to "work with".
Words matter. Why do we actively choose to use poor ones?
See the use of "poaching" to describe companies hiring employees of other companies for a prominent example in the tech community.
I'll say this again for any employer who thinks they care about their employees: please make all salary and benefits information for everyone public. Until you do so, you may not criticize Travis (of Uber) or anyone else when it comes to treating employees well. Put your money where your mouth is!
Why would I need to work at a company where all salary is transparent in order to have an opinion on whether Walmart/Amazon treat their employees fairly, whether there should be no, a lower, or a higher minimum wage, or whether Uber's culture is one that should be celebrated and modeled or reviled?
If you don't believe me, try bringing this up in a board meeting and see how far it flies. Employers benefit tremendously from the I formation assymetry which to me is a much bigger crime than some idiots who can't keep their junk in their pants.
I'm just an idiot on the Internet and you've actually made it. I'd like to apologize if this sounds condescending because it is absolutely not (in part because I'm so far below you that it is physically impossible but regardless of my fortune it is not meant to be). Mind you, i have no original thoughts and this is something i stole from buffer. I think buffer is a great example on how to do things. I wish all the sjw's in silicon valley would direct their attention to something that actually benefits the world for a change.
https://open.buffer.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-...
I encourage you to keep an open mind about this.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely yours,
Or maybe try moving away from corporations and towards cooperatives.
Problem is, making coops popular requires ambition and dedication from the workers, because there will no capitalist looking to make a profit to jumpstart the business.
...You do know that communism advocates for a society where control is something done in collaboration with others? Because China, or the USSR calls itself communist does not mean it is. A simple reading of Marx & Engels' work would clarify that.
Thus we invented advanced concepts to avoid this- like - everyone holds there breath- taxes to milk corroding power accumulating back into the system as a whole - and parliament democracy, which basically consists out of a bonemill for wanna-be dictators, grinding one another to dust in a weapon less fight for power.
One example: regulatory compliance and internal audit departments (and by extension, employees working within those groups) generally trump nearly every other department in terms of dictating processes and procedures, because ensuring that the company isn't sanctioned/fined into oblivion by regulators is an imperative for continued operation of the company. This is a necessary power structure because employees specializing in product delivery or other internal operations don't have the domain knowledge to effectively self-regulate to compliance standards, nor understand the legal and fiscal implications of non-compliance.
Consider safety on oil rigs. There, collaboration on safety is a focal point of all-hands meetings every 12 hours.
Both top-down and bottom-up management can be effective, and a combination can be even more so.
Further, there are plenty of situations, especially involving so-called "blue collar" labor, where the collaborative approach of "working with" others in a relatively flat org structure just isn't tenable, especially where definition of the product design and QA processes require high levels of technical expertise and specialization.
It would work if everyone was equally educated and motivated, but for most human purposes, a hierarchical command structure always works better.
The most important part is the ones with power giving more attention and care to the ones without - so everyone can be happy with their lives.