This is a result of decades of regulations and labour laws. Paying Americans 10x more to make similar quality tools is a terrible business decision. This cannot be fixed without government incentives/handouts (eg. Chips Act)
The individual business decision is sound, but the collective business decision is catastrophic. Not only does it create an economies of scale for adversaries instead of ourselves, but it gives them a lever to press to cause us pain. There is a national security disaster directly caused by the idea that paying Americans more is not a sound decision. Another country now has a say in what can be in our movies, and what our politicians, business persons, and celebrities can do or say. Add to this ambition, beligerance, and the prospect of war (a clear destroyer of value), and the picture gets even worse.
The answer is not handing out wads of cash to businesses like Intel that have failed to be productive by choosing business first (extract all the money possible) rather than values first (make the best products possible) practices, but to unburden our businesses with costs like healthcare and housing costs.
The minimum wage wouldn't have to be so high if there was cheap housing, good public transportation, abundant cheap healthy food, low debt policies, and government run health care. If you reduce the cost of living, you de facto reduce the cost of labor.
Housing policy that ensures limited supply and therefore high rents transfers wealth from laborers to owners, which is a transfer of money from businesses to landlords because the cost of rent is passed on to businesses in the form of wages.
Are you claiming that trade dependence between countries makes war between them more likely?
I am claiming that showing weakness by giving a powerful weapon (supply chain dependency) to an adversary invites them to see what they can get away with especially if they wish to conquer another country and you are their main blocker. Our supply chain dependency means China has a direct "cause pain" button they can push on America to cause political unrest or directly punish American involvement in China's "internal affairs." It is a tool they can use to try to make our elites present the Taiwan invasion, not as the conquering of a vibrant democracy, but as America's imperialist meddling in China's internal affairs. The supply chain can directly be used to extort our neutrality, just like Nord Stream was used to extort Germany's neutrality and corrupt Germany's elites. Is our defense posture better then that? Probably, but there is no denying Xi's China is getting more belligerent not less, which means they likely see the relative power shifts favoring them.
It is not the trade that I view as making war more likely, but the hard to replace dependency, namely Nord stream and the tech hardware supply chain.
Having the other side dependant on you in trade does give you a massive advantage.
Depends on the relative symmetry of trade—balanced, deficit or surplus—combined with other factors, of course.
This puzzle revolves around power. Power is the ability to execute force or inflict pleasure or pain. A CEO is clearly capable of painful force against their unskilled labor. A CEO can make it so someone has a harder time housing themselves, getting medical care, or feeding their children. But what power does unskilled labor have over their CEOs? Virtually none individually. So we see this reality reflected directly in wages. Unskilled labor gets paid the minimum because they have no power, and CEO's get incredible wages because they have the power to demand them.
This "agreement" is not mutual consent, but fundamentally exploitation. It's even more so exploitation when labor is sent to these poor countries.
Unions are the answer to the puzzle of "how does an unskilled laborer exercise power/prevent themselves from being exploited." Through collective action a union can cause the CEO pain and put a check on their otherwise unchecked power. In this way individuals are no longer powerless but have earned a seat at the negotiating table.
China did exactly this. They became exploited, nurtured dependence on the exploitation, and now use manufacturing's dependence on China as well as state level collective bargaining as a cudgul to execute their imperialist will on countries like Taiwan.
If you do not have the ability to commit great violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless. If you do not have the ability to execute power, you do not make agreements, you follow commands.
I personally don't understand how unions are not seen as American as the 2nd amendment. Unions are as important to preventing capitalist exploitation as guns are to preventing colonial/fascist exploitation.
Honestly I wouldn’t want to work at a company (of any size) where the CEO was only worth 10x what the lowest paid janitor makes.
I actually value the work a janitor does more than some of my colleagues, in terms of cleaning vs. creating messes.
Unionization has brought about some very beneficial improvements in working conditions and worker benefits and rights. But unions that get too big and powerful are often just as bad in different ways. They tend to make pay increases and promotions based solely on seniority instead of any measure of actual skill or work ethic, demand adherence to finicky rules about exactly who is allowed to do what work when, lose interest in representing individual workers when they don't fit the mold exactly, be just fine with driving business into bankruptcy or non-competitiveness with international competition, and generally foster an adversarial relationship between workers and management.
In the list, just about every bad union behavior corresponds to an equally bad or worse corporate behavior. Bad behavior correlates with unchecked power.
The nature of workers and management is adversarial. Working for a company is trading your stress/time for money. The company tells you it's bad to share your wage because that creates upwards pressure on wages, while they go behind your back to ADP and buy your wage history[1] so they can pay you less than you're worth/what they budgeted to create downward pressure. That sure seems adversarial to me.
I do agree that international non competitiveness is a worry, but that's also an argument in favor of letting big un-regulatable monopolies run wild (the counter argument being that monopolies kill/acquire innovation). I suspect parents who work at sweat shops tend to raise more poorly educated mentally worse off children, which then hurts the next generation of engineers/innovaters and society as a whole.
I think I would be most worried about agents (corporate or nation state) agitating small disagreements into big ones or directly compromising and harming industry via agents emplaced in union leadership.
Automation is far from unpaid. At very least it expects you to give it food (electricity, gasoline, etc.), shelter, and healthcare (repairs and maintenance). Generally the same things that humans expect from you.
Automation is significant not because it is unpaid, but because it can often do much more work for the same amount of pay.
Having 10 skilled people and 100 robots do what 1000 people would otherwise do isn't some defeat, it's fantastic. Productivity is what makes people rich in the long term.
The problem with automation is it is very hard to make it, but once it is made you can use it cheap. So you need to make many parts before it is worth it. 30 years ago it's was cheaper to pay a skilled lathe operator to turn a drawing into a single part, but if you needed 1000 it was worth writing CNC code to automate it. Today the state of CAM is such that many drawings can be turned into parts CNC directly, but assembly of those parts into a tool is often still manual unless they sell a lot of parts. (I don't know what Milwaukee is doing, but I expect cordless drills are assembled automatically, but their cordless bandsaw which is much less in demand is manual)
It's mostly just a big initial capital investment it seems.
It’s too late to tear down the current reality because there is no political will to build a new one. Perhaps giving away the long term professional knowledge core of the US to foreign countries so that capitalists could become richer and laborers could have cheaper goods will be what historians point to as the root cause of the decline of the American empire.
Mercantilism and protectionism were never a good idea.