quote:
A ton of folks my parents age still remember Ross Perot in 1992 railing against NAFTA on the campaign trail and warning that it would move jobs to Mexico and simultaneously lower the wages of many working class Americans

And he would have been right about the jobs whether NAFTA happened or not, because many have been replaced, not just by outsourced but by more efficient, productive, and effective technologies. Again. While manufacturing jobs have deceased, manufacturing output, efficiency, and productivity had increased HERE.

So cheap, outsourced labor likely exacerbated it, but then again, but there is no guarantee that those jobs wouldn't have been replaced by technology and that it would have further incentivized the technology need of those specific jobs.

Plus this ignores any benefits to the broader consumer. If consumers spend more on product A because of labor, then that's less consumers have to spend on everything else.

This post was edited on 10/10/17 at 6:05 pm

2 ...

Report Post

Posted by Bass Tiger

Member since Oct 2014

46310 posts

Posted on 10/10/17 at 6:13 pm to buckeye_vol

quote:
And he would have been right about the jobs whether NAFTA happened or not, because many have been replaced, not just by outsourced but by more efficient, productive, and effective technologies. Again. While manufacturing jobs have deceased, manufacturing output, efficiency, and productivity had increased HERE. So cheap, outsourced labor likely exacerbated it, but then again, but there is no guarantee that those jobs wouldn't have been replaced by technology and that it would have further incentivized the technology need of those specific jobs. Plus this ignores any benefits to the broader consumer

I'll let my 3 brothers and 2 sisters that worked for Mead Paper Co until 2001, that their jobs were doomed regardless if NAFTA existed or not. They had the pleasure of training their Mexican replacements and then got to help tear down the production equipment, put it on pallets, load it on flat bed rail cars and wave goodbye to 3 generations of employment for our family. Mead cut their production costs over 50% but the price of their products didn't drop one penny.