In 2011, for instance, amid a period of labor unrest, Hong hai announced to the world with much fanfare that they were going to soon eliminate 1 million jobs with robots. They subsequently created about 400,000 jobs. Nobody noticed.
After the industrial revolution, the enclosure movement was used to strip peasants of their land. After being dispossessed, they were then desperate enough to accept the paltry wages and disgusting working conditions offered by the factory owners.
Today, a Chinese factory worker may be saving money because they need to care for their infirm grandmother living in a cancer village because the state provides little to no social welfare support for her.
Do you think it's germane to argue on a moral basis that because China provides no welfare for that grandmother that American factory workers ought to take a pay cut?
Personally, I think trade policy needs to be intimately connected to human rights and environmental and labor conditions. No improvement in those sectors, no deal. That isn't the world we live in though. We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.
It's never ever ever going to happen. Be careful what you wish for. If what you wanted to happen happened, you would be paying over $100 for the same shirt that costs you $6 in Walmart right now.
I also want to point out that, yes, in a globally competitive world wages become globally competitive. If a Chinese worker with an infirm grandmother is surviving on a lower wage than an American was making without an infirm grandmother, then that American needs to find better work, do better quality work, or take a pay cut. We would never force consumers to buy products produced only by ethical means or only by human-rights approved conditions (if that were the case, no more chocolate!). Why would we do that to multinational companies?
There aren't other options available. No President is going to preside over the term where all the trade deals were made alongside human rights conditionals and all the goods skyrocketed in price leading to another Great Depression.
> We live in a world where Obama tried to excuse Malaysian slavery in order to try and enact a trade deal so that American workers could be forced to compete with slaves in Malaysia.
You can boohoo about it all you want, but your chocolate, your coffee, your clothes, and your computer parts are all made by or had their materials harvested by slaves, and most likely you would scoff at voluntarily paying twice the price for all those commodities. I'm not saying everyone should be enslaved. But if consumers have the right to purchase such ill-made goods, then companies have the right to offshore their labor forces to such places too.
$100 is sheer fantasy. It might double the price of a shirt from $6 to $12.
>There aren't other options available. No President is going to preside over the term where all the trade deals were made alongside human rights conditionals
This is actually how it used to happen and this is partly how TPP was killed in Congress (by attaching an anti-slavery rider).
>You can boohoo about it all you want, but your chocolate, your coffee, your clothes, and your computer parts are all made by or had their materials harvested by slaves, and most likely you would scoff at voluntarily paying twice the price for all those commodities.
No, I'm more than happy to pay a extra for chocolate, coffee, clothes and computer parts if I get to live in a world where labor exploitation, environmental destruction and slavery is made more difficult.
Are you really willing to go on the record and state that your preference is for the opposite?
Honestly, IMO scaling down western consumerism by a lot (for example, by fixing and mending the same small set of shirts for years) would be a small price to pay for the resulting increase global happiness. We more or less lived like that during communism in Poland (chocolate, coffee, oranges were uncommon, meat was not an obvious choice for dinner, we fixed appliances, electronics and cars for decades) and I think people might have actually been happier back then.
Those shifts - i.e. the industrial revolution - were enormously disruptive!
Assuming that this is happening; or going to happen, how can we smooth it out a bit?
And of course; that is on the basis that this is not a science fiction AI special; in which case an even more thoughtful approach might be required to minimise the damage and maximise happiness; or whatever variable you prefer.
Like, let's say we know factory workers will be laid off, so we need to allocate resources to retrain them.
Very likely the resources will not be enough for all the workers. So who gets them and who doesn't will become a political battle, with the left-out group resenting everyone in society and society ignoring their needs because it reminds them that they left them behind.
And then you build a society where one group's triumph is based on another's suppression, and you can see where this is going...