re: The board room is killing America. And themselves.

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4cubbies

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c-word

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That checks out.

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You're right about the long-term effects. My point is that it is a central part of the corporate structure, it's not just boardroom decisions. CEOs have limited options.

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Then explain DEI,

The wage numbers you found online are for “production workers in all industries.” That includes laundry, food processing, warehouse work, and other low-wage jobs. Those are not the kinds of manufacturing jobs the U.S. lost to China and Mexico.

The right category is “Durable Goods Manufacturing,” which covers autos, appliances, machinery, aerospace, and the higher-skill factory work that actually left. Those jobs pay around twenty-nine dollars an hour, roughly sixty thousand a year. You can check it here:
LINK
(Search “Durable Goods Manufacturing, Production and Nonsupervisory.”)

About the job numbers. Yes, we lost around six million manufacturing jobs. But each manufacturing job supports more jobs around it, in suppliers and local services. MIT found that every one factory job lost takes two or three more jobs with it. You can read the China Shock study here:
LINK
So the real impact wasn’t a few percent of the workforce. It was more like fifteen to twenty million workers affected.

On the refrigerator example, big appliances are capital-intensive. Most of the cost is materials and automation. Labor is a small slice. So a one-hundred-dollar cost difference between U.S. and overseas is reasonable. The ten-dollar-versus-twenty-dollar product in that video is a cheap, labor-heavy item. You can’t use that as a model for something like a fridge.

Wage stagnation is not a conspiracy theory. The Census Bureau’s own tables show real male earnings basically flat since the late 1970s. You can check here:
LINK
A big part of that flattening is that millions of sixty-thousand-dollar factory jobs were replaced by forty-thousand-dollar service jobs.

As for consumers, even if an imported appliance is cheaper by fifty or a hundred bucks, people only buy one every ten to twelve years. Spread out, that’s a few dollars a year. Meanwhile, the wage loss hits the same community every year.

A tariff at the start would have simply leveled the cost difference. If offshoring saves a company about a hundred dollars per unit and the tariff adds that back, the math changes and the plant stays. That’s not ideology. That’s making sure short-term corporate decisions don’t wreck long-term national income.

The problem with your refrigerator example, and the premise that we can ever get back to a manufacturing economy, is that those jobs simply wont exist, even if they were onshored back to the US. The vast majority of it will just be automated.

And theres a damn good chance that same automation is about to wipe out our technology and service jobs with AI now as well.

This is why we are in this odd 'recession' where S&P graph continues to go up, while the average american continues to go down.

We are at a crossroads as a society in how we deal with a post industrial socioeconomic landscape. Personal income will have to be derived at least partially outside of a human-in-a-job concept. Perhaps some kind of hybridization where smaller gig based incomes are supplemented with UBI, I have no clue. Entire concepts of work will have to be re defined.

The irony is humans have been developing labor saving devices for millennia, and now that we are finally on the precipice of fully automating all of our basic needs, it is causing more chaos and insecurity than security and fulfilment.

I get what you’re saying. Your point is that if new factories are going to be automated anyway, then why bother bringing them back. You’re assuming automation means there won’t be jobs, so onshoring doesn’t matter.

But here’s the part that is missed.
Those automated factories still need people. They just need better-paid, higher-skill jobs instead of the old low-skill ones. Things like robotics techs, repair techs, electricians, programmers, quality control, and engineering support. These pay a lot more than the service jobs people end up in now when a factory leaves. So even with automation, the jobs that remain are higher wage jobs, not lower.

Next, even an automated plant supports a lot around it. The parts suppliers. The maintenance crews. The machine shops. The truckers. The contractors. The packaging plants. The local service jobs. That doesn’t disappear just because robots are doing the repetitive stuff. Germany, Japan, and South Korea are three of the most automated manufacturing countries in the world, and they still have strong middle classes because the good work that surrounds those factories stays in the country.

Here’s the simple truth.
Automation didn’t destroy American manufacturing.
Offshoring did.
The robotics and automation still happened. We just let other countries get all the good jobs that go with them.

So the problem isn’t “robots will take the jobs.”
The problem is “robots took the jobs somewhere else.”

And if AI ends up eliminating a lot of low-end service jobs here, that makes having high-skill, high-wage industrial work in the country even more important, not less. Because people still have to make stuff somewhere. Cars, appliances, batteries, medical equipment. Automation doesn’t change that. It just changes what the jobs look like. And the jobs it leaves behind are better than the ones we’ve replaced them with.

The reason offshoring was made possible was cheap transportation costs especially ocean freight in large containerships

Excellent post.

There are some idiotic responses like wackatimesthree, but they have not experienced actually working in a manufacturing plant in the US circa 1990 to 2010, I have. As well I have been involved with manufacturing locations throughout the southeast and several were closed by the offshore ideology promoted by consultants (which continues to this day).

In every site I was involved with the manufacturing jobs were the premier jobs in those small towns, paying 20% to 30% higher wages in general, and many of the higher skilled positions (maintenance, lead operators on production lines) were making from $80k to $100k (with OT).

These plants closing devastated many small local economies. It is offensive to hear people say this is some sort of propaganda.

I am not certain that the tariffs will help, but I am all for President Trump trying this avenue for some type of relief. At least he is attempting something.

Well it was management that worked with the red Chinese to screw American workers.

So who is the socialist?

I'd rather be pro American.

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Is it that you don't believe that the CEO is a fiduciary to the shareholders, or that you don't understand what a fiduciary is?

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So DEI doesn’t figure into your equation?