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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to just pick up and switch when you are so entrenched.

That said, I would love if more US companies built stuff here in the US. Yeah, prices might be a little higher, but at least we aren't exploiting the labor of vulnerable people in foreign countries anymore.

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I don't know. People in developing countries choose to work long hard hours because it's better than what they've had and they all want to better their condition. It's not perfect, but better than the alternative.

My biggest concern right now with China trade, aside from their abysmal environmental standards is that they are actively committing ethnic cleansing[1]. It baffles me how little attention this gets.

To the point of exploitation, why not use tariffs as a way to enforce standards AND protect economic interests? Instead of targeting specific countries, it could be a points based system where "Long hours without overtime?" +5%, "Poor safety standards" +10%, and so on. Not to say the US is necessarily perfect here, but as far as I can tell, it's a long way ahead of the typical places it outsources production to. Enforcement might be hard, but any resistance to inspection etc. could be met with automatic application of the suspected tariff.

This seems like it would satisfy the goal of advancing human rights, but also give a more incentive to just hire workers in the developed countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps

Many Chinese would thank you because you bought stuff manufactured by them. Without the opportunity to work on those "exploiting job", they'd be doing something with much less pay and much more hard works, and many of their next generations would be still doing the same job instead of having the opportunity to gain better education.

> prices might be a little higher

I was curious about this, so I found a somewhat recent study that looked at how much it would cost for an "all-american" iPhone. The authors of the study think it would cost about $30-40/phone to do final assembly in the US (with Chinese and other foreign components), and sourcing all-US components would add another $30-40/phone. What is only lightly mentioned is the many, many billions of dollars it would take to build all of those production lines domestically, which makes it a non-starter. I could easily imagine it costing hundreds of billions of dollars.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601491/the-all-american-i...

This shows an incredible ignorance of the employment market of tool and die makers in the US and the American manufacturing enviroment in general.

Simply put, the US has nowhere close to the skilled labor force needed to 'bring it home'. In Flint, MI, as of 2017, journeyman die-makers pull about $130k. Yes, that Flint. [0,1] Yes, starting wages for a CS bachelors in SF. But for a person without a HS degree. In Flint.

Journeyman takes about 5 years of post-HS apprenticeshiping and the relevant CAD and math skills, FYI.

So, you may be thinking that in about 5 years time the US would be able to get back to where we are today.

We currently have ~70k tool and die makers in the US [2]. Though numbers are very hard to come by, as of 2006 there were about 3 million tool and die makers in China, about 1 million of which came at the expense of US jobs [3]. So, we need to grow the US tool and die makers in the US by roughly 1500%. Not 10%, not 100%, not 500%, but by ~1500%.

That, simply, is not going to happen without massive government financial input. That bill, to get all the tool and die makers that we need in the next 5 years at ~$15/hr that an apprentice makes, would cost about $145,000,000,000 in just wages. For just die-makers. Then you have assemblers, machinists, lathers, welders, etc. We're talking trillions at the low-ball numbers for the cost to re-educate the workforce. This will be a double digit percentage increase in the cost to manufacture anything that you pay for. The US consumer and the US government are simply not going to pay for that.

[0] https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/tool-and-dying-aut...

[1] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Certification=Journeyma... US average wage for die-making is about $26/hr, FYI.

[2] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes514111.htm

[3] https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/moncrieff_statement...

Vulnerable? Maybe. But they are taking less pay because they have no other alternatives. Buying nothing from them does not improve their situation. In fact much of the Chinese (or other low cost countries) economy has come from the vast amount of US dollars that have been injected for low cost goods. That has for sure raised things in those countries. Not for everyone but it's not like the 1950's either or even close. Ask anyone who grew up in the 60's and 70's what China was like back then.

> It's hard to just pick up and switch when you are so entrenched.

Companies play arbitrage with the costs of doing business in different countries all the time. Union issues at your plant in Mexico? Close it down (taking a "loss") and switch production to India, or China. It happens all the time as externalities change the profit equation, companies will and do react accordingly.

That's an extremely narrow version of global economics. There are tons of benefits to local markets being serviced by local producers, and there are also benefits to being serviced by foreign producers. Also, if you take those jobs away from foreign markets without replacing them (or fixing the labor conditions) how exactly can you see a generation starving and jobless as a net good?

Isolationism doesn't work without completely changing the paradigm, and what you're proposing is basically just saying "Good luck on your own" as if without American corporations these people would immediately shift to some sort of worker's paradise.

>but at least we aren't exploiting the labor of vulnerable people in foreign countries anymore

Well, they will be jobless now.

But people in other countries would have those jobs available, which is just as good.

I think pollution is a bigger problem. Even some runoff causes nation wide attention and scandals in the public eye.

That's my question: do the people that want 100pc of the manufacturing to come back to the US have a plan for the inevitable ecological fallout? When we outsourced production to China we also outsourced the pollution produced by that manufacturing.

And that pollution runs more or less unchecked in China. At least in the US, they'd be regulated by the EPA (for what that's worth).

Not to pick on you, but: the fact that people here are discussing Trump's insane drivel as if it were a sensible policy proposal with pros and cons to debate is highly disturbing to me. I can almost see the Overton window inching rightwards in real time.

The people have voluntarily agreed to work for the companies. How does it help them if the option is removed?

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