The recent “saved” jobs announcements, name-dropping Trump even when the decision had been made months earlier bother me. But the bigger picture is more troubling. There are a lot of off-shored jobs that cannot be threatened with tariffs. What retaliatory action can be taken when a company off-shores their customer support call center. Or data processing. Or coding. A vast majority of American jobs are not in manufacturing.<\/p>\n
But, sure, let’s not focus on the bigger sectors being off-shored. As a manufacturer, you can go where the labor costs (as well as, I suspect, real estate \/ regulatory requirements \/ etc) are cheap and face a 35% import tariff. You can hire Americans and \u00a0increase your prices … but unless *all* foreign imports get taxed, that just makes you noncompetitive. You can hire Americans and reduce your profit … notwithstanding investor revolt, there’s a point at which you lose money on each product you sell. Or you build out an automated factory in the US – real estate and such may cost more, but your labor costs are REALLY low.<\/p>\n
It might not have been cost effective to build a robotic manufacturing line in the US compared to overseas labor. Overseas labor – 35% tariff though … may well make automation cost effective without actually increasing manufacturing employment in the country. Learning how to program and maintain robots, though, may be a growing market.<\/p>\n
Like the bank executives who got incredible bonuses while writing dodgy mortgages … in the short term, this\u00a0does<\/em> mean jobs are saved.\u00a0A couple years from now, as the robotic manufacturing replaces those workers … they’re still unemployed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The recent “saved” jobs announcements, name-dropping Trump even when the decision had been made months earlier bother me. But the bigger picture is more troubling. There are a lot of off-shored jobs that cannot be threatened with tariffs. What retaliatory action can be taken when a company off-shores their customer support call center. Or data …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[26,24,79],"class_list":["post-794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-politics","tag-random","tag-unemployment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=794"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":797,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions\/797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rushworth.us\/lisa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}