Not sure exactly what you mean by this but I can pretty confidently answer no. The value is in the productivity not the labor...unless you think Marx was right.
No, but I'm concerned with American workers under free trade. The workers get cheaper goods (as does everyone here), but the trade-off is some will be displaced as they are put in direct competition with workers in lower wage countries. So, for the workers, there's a give and take in free trade. I can see how free trade benefits businesses even beyond the lower prices which they would also receive. If they're having a tough time due to our minimum wage laws, worker safety laws, and/or environmental regulations, they can move outside the jurisdiction and compete with the same companies for the same US customers. What isn't as clear to me is what the businesses are losing in order to gain these advantages (not saying there isn't anything).
The main thing I was trying to get from this part of the discussion is: do we have a way of quantifying the value of a job domestically (versus anywhere else in the world) so that we can include it in the evaluation when determining whether it benefits us to trade freely with another country? My concern is that we're not accounting for everything changing hands in the deal and therefore not keeping an accurate score, which means we may not even realize when/if we're getting the bad end of the deal.
I wasn't talking about demand for the goods they make, I was talking about demand for their labor.
I know. The fact you were talking about demand for labor is what made me be specific about the type of demand I was talking about.
What guarantee has there ever been that job growth in other areas of the economy will replace the jobs that become outdated? Even with protectionism, there is no guarantee.
You're right. Even under protectionism, there is no guarantee, but free trade dictates that we double down on something that is not guaranteed.
Again, we lose far more jobs to automation than we do other countries....like 5x as many. We keep experiencing job growth in other areas.
Another good point that I think cuts both ways. In addition to those jobs, I read a study stating that 47% of US jobs could be automated. So, we've already got a raging inferno at one end of the candle. I'm struggling not to see free trade as lighting the other end.
I can see how automation will create some jobs (most likely better jobs if you have the skills), but it will create less jobs than were lost by its very nature. We get more productivity out of those man-hours, so it's definitely progress, but now this industry has a deficit of jobs. We already count on job growth in other industries to balance this out, but if we trade freely with lower wage countries, we'll be counting on this job growth even more.
Maybe it would help for you to explain how free trade creates jobs. I can see that newly lowered costs could make some business models feasible that weren't feasible before which would encourage/facilitate innovation. What else?
We don't want to neutralize their comparative advantage. It's to our benefit. We all gain from their low wages. That is the whole point of outsourcing.
Even if we did want to make things "fair" as you put it, I have no faith in the government's ability to execute on this. It would likely be a disaster and ripe for corruption.
I agree that the government would likely mess it up both intentionally and unintentionally, but I'm more concerned with what we should be doing rather than what the government would turn it into if implemented.
From a wage standpoint, I can see the benefit that we receive in return for the costs (although I'm still skeptical of our ability to determine whether we come out ahead). From an environmental standpoint, I don't. We decide it's a bad thing to allow our manufacturing to pollute in certain ways, and go so far as to pass laws against it. Then, free trade comes along and allows it to be a comparative advantage if it's done somewhere else. Well, should we have these environmental regulations, or shouldn't we? If the acts prohibited by these laws are wrong, how is paying for someone else to perform them somewhere else different than doing them yourself here? In this case, free trade defeats the purpose of environmental protection laws while turning them into a disadvantage for domestic businesses. I'd feel better about free trade if it had a way to handle this situation.
I don't really think this is a concern at all. I don't think it should have any bearing on our current trade policy. Making rules for hypotheticals that don't exist is one of the reasons government is so bloated.
That being said, if we want to improve working standards in other countries, the absolute best way to do that is trade with them. We may find sweat shop labor standards distasteful, but there is no better alternative. We can try to use our influence to ask Nike to raise wages, but the second we force it on Nike is the second they move operations and then all those workers are starving instead of working in poor conditions.
It's the sad reality of the world. The good news is they only have to go through 1 or 2 generations of this if government gets out of the way, and then they can be like us and Hong Kong and Chile, etc.
I think the possibility of slavery abroad is an important consideration when looking at free trade because it's a situation in which no reasonable person could argue that the workers aren't being exploited. To me, it highlights that workers are seemingly an afterthought in the theory of free trade. It seems like by trading with slavers at all (and especially freely), we would be enabling them to continue and expand when we should be trying to put them out of business IMO. I understand that it's not a perfect solution because things would get much much worse for the slaves before it would hurt the masters, but it would likely prevent future generations of slaves.
The other reason I think it's important is because it shows that free trade would put our workers in direct competition with slaves if it comes to that, which explains why there are no qualms about anything in between. It appears that since we can't exploit workers here by paying them say $0.99/hr, we've figured out another way to exploit our workers by making them compete against those making $0.99/hr.
I've been digging through the dirt of free trade for a bit now, but maybe at this point you should show me how bad protectionism is. I understand that we would see higher prices domestically, potentially for inferior products. What else?
