When we priced a U.S.-made version of our flagship product 85% higher than our Chinese-made one, 25,650 customers had the chance to vote with their wallets. Here’s what happened. As small business owners, we’ve heard it a thousand times: “I’d gladly pay more to support American-made.” We wanted to believe it. So we put
TBH I think that’s the wrong takeaway. That polling result showed something like 25% of those polled would want to work in a factory if they could. If that result were valid for the entire US, that would be something like 50 million (out of ~210 million working age). For reference, peak manufacturing employment in the US was in the late 1970s with around 20 million people working in manufacturing out of ~110 million working age.
The problem is that there is a reality between people who claim to want to take those jobs, and the real actual jobs that exist on a modern factory floor. I need to keep reiterating this to people because the propaganda is so thick, but there are manufacturing jobs in the U.S. the problem is that most of them are third shift and under some pretty shitty circumstances even for factory work and they don’t pay near equivalent to what they did in the 70’s, none of which is solved by ‘bringing manufacturing jobs back’. The problem is what first world people want for ‘factory work’ fundamentally does not exist under global capitalism, even if it is still a pretty easy way to make some decent money if you can hack it.
As I keep telling people irl, bringing jobs back is admirable, we should be producing closer to our areas of consumption, but who is going to work them if we can’t fill the lines on the factories we already have?
So I mean… when you’re a business and you’re looking to build a new factory you look at unemployment in the city and the surrounding cities, along with base pay for similar work in those cities, and many other things. So it’s not like bringing more manufacturing jobs here are gonna be built directly next to existing factories and only offer 3rd shifts. I agree there are plenty of other things we need but like, it at least isn’t something bad for us?
Yes, and my point is that people have been looking at that in the U.S. for years, and the only way for them to get large facilities in the states has been to literally give them tax free status for a decade, and even then it does not always work or follow through. The unemployment just isn’t there, and underpaid factory work doesn’t solve the main problem of the U.S., which is underemployment, which we are seeking to solve primarily by defunding education, which is an incredibly backwards way of doing shit.
Asking for a major shift in the economy, which has been a primarily service economy for decades now, is extremely difficult. What we actually need a huge expansion of social spending and de-privatization and de-monopolization with some level of onshoring of basic consumer goods.
Ahhh that’s a much higher number than I remember. I stand corrected.