Not when it comes to buying things, which is what this situation is.
Blue collar workers in the US (or other developed nations) don't have a moral demand on you to purchase their labor at the same rate forever. If someone across the street (or across an ocean) is selling the same product for less money it's perfectly fine to buy it from them instead.
Do you think it's immoral when you, say, switch from Verizon to AT&T to get a cheaper rate on your cell phone plan?
Virtually no one is unemployed in the US because of the combination of international trade and minimum wage laws.
- Wage growth over time - Health outcomes - Savings rate - Credit card debt rate - Feelings about the future (are we on the right track/wrong track?)
The stats you mention are interesting but not relevant to OPs assertion that a wage floor in developed nations was problematic in a free trade world.
Also: things cost more in the US. You can't survive on 3rd world sweatshop wages in the US, even if they were permitted by abolishing minimum wage laws.
Very little, actually. Bus drivers need to buy more than bus tickets: even if you reduced their wages to third-world levels and reduced bus ticket prices to third-world levels, bus drivers still get sick and need to pay the doctor? Are you going to push doctor salaries down to third-world levels too? What about education, etc? At some point, you're just going to be pushing wages down across the economy and importing massive levels of inequality.
Expecting to people to take massive pay cuts and enact massive deflation in the name of market liberalism is frankly an ideologically-blinkered, impractical, stupid idea. It entails too much pain for little to no actual gain. The only people happy with the results would be a s small minority of oligarchs and ideological purists.
The people across the ocean in this instance are working obscene hours under deplorable conditions. When you take your business to these overseas firms you are effectively telling your local workers "these are the conditions I think you ought to be working under."
Except it's even worse because you don't have the stones to say it to their face.
"When you take your business to them you are effectively telling your local workers..."
By "them" I meant the overseas workers. My bad.
Unequivocally yes! Understanding this ironclad fact is one of the most important things to understand about changes in the world economy over the last 50 years.
China has gone from a country full of subsistence farmers to a country of middle class wage earners.
From the perspective of a critic of wage labour (and class society), one form of domination in substinence farming has been replaced by arguably a quantitatively better but much more cunning and egregious one, which disguises its aims through the mantra of freedom to buy and sell - and you won't find many people who would give up that freedom now. That doesn't mean the freedom is desirable, it just means it's better than what came before.
In addition, while working in a factory making iPhones might not be the best of jobs, it's a hell of a lot better breaking one's back on the rice patties every day.
When you compare living conditions and material benefits, of course the world is better, but that comes at the moral cost frequently expressed as "sweatshops are necessary because the country becomes richer and you get better living conditions". I don't know how this is justified, this kind of trade-off is not justified by any major ethical system, including most serious forms of utilitarianism.
Consider the case of a Chinese peasant farmer who has has land confiscated by the regime, so now he gets to make iPhones to earn a wage so he can spend it on buying food and shelter and medical care. The conditional freedom of needing to sell one's product (whether that is a material thing the peasant makes, or the labour power the iPhone factory worker produces) hasn't been eliminated, it's just changed form.
You claim to be able to reduce these factors to a comparison in which you can say one is better than the other, and I'm not convinced the reduction is sound. Most people, even our iPhone factory worker, would think that there is (and there should be) more to life than the wage and its spending.
Chinese people used to starve to death all the time because they couldn't afford to buy food. Now that happens much less often because China has gotten much richer through international trade.
That's a much better world.
This is an astounding comparison that seems to aim to reduce questions of exploitation down to questions of personal morality, rather than the actual historical development of the systems we have and the ones we like to see. Is it immoral to switch phone providers? I don't think so. Is the system in which switching a cell phone provider can actually harm labourers morally questionable, even on the grounds that liberal egalitarians set out? For sure.
Labor.
But that's an entirely different situation than the matter at hand, where we're talking about the United States government's policies on trade and the impact on our entire labor class and their fate within our own borders.
The entire point of an economy is to serve humanity. We're all participating in this circus to put food on our tables, provide for our children, grow, and enjoy life. We cannot lose sight of that fact. We have an obligation to see labor not as just cogs in a machine, but rather as constituents whose well-being we have an obligation to protect.
(I have to say, and I'm sure you don't mean it, but you comparing a human being to a cell phone plan is among the more callous things I've read on these forums. It might behoove you to sprinkle a bit more empathy in your language, just a tiny bit.)
In the vast majority of circumstances you aren't firing an individual American and hiring an individual from China. You're just choosing to buy something from a giant corporation that manufactures goods in China instead of a competing giant corporation that manufactures goods in the US. Switching cell phone providers is just like switching from American Giant (made in America) to some other purveyor of sweaters that manufactures overseas.
Are you saying that you think you have a moral obligation to buy things made by American workers, who are universally wealthier and have access to a much stronger social safety net, than Chinese workers?
If anything it seems like it would be the opposite to me.
But if it's not, then we shouldn't restrict free trade.
But, then, aren't we just making a trade at that point? I will fire 100 local blue collar workers, and hire 100 foreign workers who will do their job for less. I hurt 100 people, help 100 people, and along the way pocket some extra cash for myself. I think most moral systems would have a problem with this. It is generally thought of as immoral to rend one person in order to help one other.
(Yes, things get complicated when you hurt N people to help more than N people, depending on the number of extra people helped and the kind of hurt. For example, sacrificing soldiers in order to save an entire country. Generally speaking though, most moral systems have a problem with hurting people against their will except in extraordinary situations involving very large numbers. Does this trade situation qualify as that? I'm skeptical that is does.)
There has to be a better way. Some way where we aren't harming local blue collar workers, but are still helping foreign nations develop, while giving those foreign nations on the path of strong worker protections and wages that we have here.