Germany and Switzerland have managed to maintain high wages and high standards of living in a globally competitive manufacturing sector.
The idea that all this change is inevitable or impossible to avoid and we can't pay workers properly is just bullshit, it's the messaging of a multi-decade well financed public relations effort by people in the U.S. with a vested interest in making the public believe it.
The Mittelstand doesn't do the sort of manufacturing that the rust belt did 40 years ago. These smaller firms existing today only because of big disparities in quality between their products and cheaper competitors. They benefit enormously from the German government's investment in applied research.
https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/manufacturi...
I watch VP's get million dollar bonuses while laying off workers. I watch execs outsource whole departments, watch quality tank, and they get millions.
The center can not hold. It will come crashing down.
A company that does not move to cheaper labour will go bankroupt and a new all China company will simply take over. So you have unemployed anyway.
The typical solution to this is that you start walling of these industries with tarrifs or to subsides.
What you eventually have is a huge sector of the US economy that lives of the higher prices and/or taxes of the rest of the population while everybody has lower standards of living.
Once China started institutional reforms there were only two possibilites, these jobs were payed for by other americans or they go away.
Also, most americans only had these jobs because the US was able to export lots of these manufactures.