Could In-Sourcing Labor Be a Solution for Rebuilding American Manufacturing?
TerraCycle Tom-Blog
For decades, we in the US have watched jobs--especially manual labor--be exported overseas to countries like China, Vietnam, and India, where people work for significantly less money. In general, I've noticed that wages drop by an order of magnitude, moving from developed ($10/hour) to developing counties ($10/day) and then by another order of magnitude when moving from developing countries to third world ($1/day). These are rough numbers, but they do underscore my point.
Beyond issues of equity and environment, one of the major negatives to manufacturing abroad is transportation (namely, the costs and time). It stinks having to wait six to eight weeks for your goods to make it from China on a boat.
So are there alternatives? Or do we have to just accept a global manufacturing system? Tariffs have been used to protect domestic workers--but what if we offered negative tariffs--that is incentives--for goods to be manufactured in the US?