Comment by modo_mario
7 hours ago
>But for the bottom of the barrel jobs this doesn't hold and you can check by looking at the salaries for these jobs in the countries that can't offshore further. They're still dismal.
No. It absolutely holds and the lowest common denominator is not some argument that it can't be better. Supressing wages in higher income countries does not mean that the lowest income countries somehow get pulled up proportionally.
>The real reason is that the people looking at these jobs have no negotiating power whatsoever. They have no essential irreplaceable skills or experience, nothing that's hard to find on the market. All they have usually is the desperation to do any job to make a living.
My grandparents on one side of the family had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power. Glass cutting at a glass factory, rolling cigars, soldering on an assembly line. Their negotiating power existed based on the fact that they were good workers and would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.
Now that negotiating power is gone. They wouldn't go to philips or so because philips doesn't manufacture here anymore. The equivalent jobs that can't be outsourced run from my experience mostly on imported workers from poorer countries who will be replaced the moment they demand better conditions. The effects of that supression on "bottom of the barrel" job leeches upwards into jobs that people perceive as higher status without many people noticing. After all those people that would have done them still go for a different job.
> Now that negotiating power is gone. They wouldn't go to philips or so because philips doesn't manufacture here anymore.
Remains me of the derelict shithole I live in now.
I meet all sorts of people here that talk about the past residents of the city and the really cool, technology. One post the other day was about someone’s grandpa who was a chemist who pioneered the encapsulation used in scratch-and-sniff samples. My partner has all sorts of stories about the characters she’s met in her life and there’s a lot of really intelligent, create technical people.
There’s a little bit of that stuff left here, but it’s exclusive to the industry defense. There are hardly any companies hiring for any scientific/technical work outside of that. In their place, junkies, urban blight, and shitty Chinese manufacture ring companies that dodge immigration law.
> had jobs that required no (At least not after a good amount of training) essential irreplaceable skills or experience and had plenty of purchasing power.
The world changed. The skill pool was expanded significantly and skills are distributed differently. It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.
> would fuck off to a different factory or pressure trough a union. They did very well for themselves.
You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap that every "factory" now pays the same shitty salary, and there are no unions because they drive wages and by extension prices up.
You want more proof? Amazon drivers are safe from offshoring, you can't deliver a package in the US while being physically in India. So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap. Offshoring had little to do with it in real life, only in the heads of nationalists.
> You wanted stuff so cheap
No, I don't decide shit. Shareholders wanted profit margins so wide.
Funny how good you are at understanding bargaining power in labor markets and how dogshit you are at understanding it in consumer goods.
> No, I don't decide shit.
Shareholders can't force you to make them money. Blame is probably shared but it's your pressure to have super fast deliveries for anything because you can't wait or walk to a store that shareholders are exploiting for profit. It's your demands and expectations that make those Amazon drivers pee in bottles.
You can always boycott Amazon and the shareholders can't do anything to force you back. But you don't, you keep buying from them with fast delivery.
Same applies to everything else. Do you ever factor in the people’s pay when you select a service? Do you pick the companies that pay the best salaries even if the price is higher? If someone offers you a service from a guy who's paid more, you balk and go to another provider who gives the same service from a guy who's paid less.
The cop-out is always "but what can I do, I'm just one person?" so you keep perpetrating this.
>The world changed. The skill pool was expanded significantly and skills are distributed differently.
For a lot of the jobs described that really isn't the big factor.
>It used to be that no formal education was needed for some things, now everyone expects a PhD.
Again more of a consequence of the "elite overproduction" and policy than anything else. I'm sure that earlier mentioned callcenter job could happen without a social sciences degree as can myriads of jobs i supported in factories.
>You still don't get it do you? You wanted stuff so cheap >Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.
a) Stop projecting
b) I'm not arguing against what individuals want when spending. Americans such as you wanted cheaper and better cars and electronics and..... Japan provided those but not because japan was a libertarian paradise. America strongarmed them out of that position not because it is some kind of libertarian paradise. Same with the new competition in some fields from China.
> So why are they still paid a pittance and have to pee in bottles while driving? Because they have no leverage and you wanted everything dirt cheap.
PS They have better conditions and pay in my country. It still isn't great. Again due to lack of leverage since a lot of them are migrants. I'm sure you're supportive of that eroded lack of leverage but don't project it onto me. At some point you'll just end up arguing for the relative competitive advantage of places with slavery.
> PS They have better conditions and pay in my country. It still isn't great. Again due to lack of leverage since a lot of them are migrants.
Took a while to guide to horse to water. We circled back to what I said from the first comment [0]: the lowest end jobs have very low salaries because these people have no leverage (multitude of factors, some of which I listed), not because of offshoring. This situation holds true even from jobs that are safe from offshoring.
> a) Stop projecting
> I'm sure you're supportive of that eroded lack of leverage but don't project it onto me.
The old "You don't project onto me! I project onto you!". But somehow you managed to screw up even your diss at me. Supporting the "eroded lack of leverage" means supporting the leverage. Maybe you wanted to say I "support the lack of leverage". I'm a strong supporter of everyone being able to have a good life, whether they do a job locally or from offshore. I won't get into that discussion because I don't think you care that much for anything more complex than grandparent stories.
So I'm sorry Mario but your reasoning skills are in another castle.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48033641