How does exporting dirty industry and dangerous jobs to a place where they are less regulated serve humanity?
Let me change your analogy because it is completely unrepresentative of the externalities involved in manufacturing.
Say you own a business that happens to produce a bunch of toxic waste that requires dangerous handling, and special payment to dispose of. You don’t want your employees to do it because it’s requires a specially trained employee and having them around increases you workers comp insurance significantly, and they also want hazard pay as a result of their training. Buuut you can go down the street and hire Jo from the corner to take it off your hands for $50. He doesn’t care how dangerous it is, he just needs money for heroin. You can just report that you didn’t produce the waste he’s taking and nobody will be the wiser.
Should you hire Jo to take care of it, or handle it yourself? You understand the danger, know how to handle the material, and have the means to dispose of it in an equitable way to everyone. Would hiring Jo be right, simply because he’d be $50 poorer if I didn’t hire him?
What if my business didn’t produce toxic waste? What if Jo isn’t a heroin addict but instead a poor third world person who lives a subsistence level life?
Should I be prevented from offering Jo a better, higher paying assembly job because a small group of sleazy manufacturers use his country to escape environmental regulations?
Apple isn’t outsourcing assembly to escape environmental regulations. It’s offering better paying jobs that are lifting chinese and Indian workers out of poverty, while also reducing the cost of their products. That makes them more affordable to a wider audience. Apple, workers and consumers win, because free trade benefits all parties.
Environmental controls can only be implemented at the national and international level. If China doesn’t implement them, it’s not the fault of US companies.
If you make leading edge batteries that produce lots of toxic waste as a byproduct, the US will require you institute expensive controls/cleaning processes to prevent it from leaking into the environment.
But if China doesn’t have similar controls, making those batteries will be cheaper in China. If the US maker doesn’t go to China to make their batteries, they will lose marketshare to companies that do, or more likely Chinese companies.
If the US bans Chinese made batteries over environmental reasons, it makes US made electric cars uncompetitive and we lose sales and jobs to Chinese and European car makers.
So it’s never free trade at fault, it’s lack of international cooperation on environmental policies. If Chinese made products had to meet a base set of environmental manufacturing standards to be sold in Europe AND North America, they’d comply or lose 90% of their sales.
But the problem is that your arguments are often used disingenuously by labor unions whose actual agenda is protectionist policies to raise manufacturing costs in the third world to protect their members from competition. They really want to impose US level minimum wages in third world nations, which would be a disaster given they don’t have the capital and skills to support them. A backwards policy that hurts us too by protecting low value jobs we should be advancing out of.
>What if my business didn’t produce hazardous waste.
Then it wouldn’t be a good fit for an analogy regarding the externalities of globalism.
> Environmental controls can only be implemented at the national and international level.
False. Apple could have actually applied their own internal standards that they market, and shareholders could also have standards(lol).
>if the US bans Chinese batteries, it makes US made cars uncompetitive
You don’t say, this has been a tad condescending my dude. That said, aren’t batteries kind of an ironic choice given that Tesla built its gigafactory here? Which kinda illustrates what bugs me about the realities of globalism, most of the time regulations on industry predominantly increase start-up costs. Having dealt with both OSHA and the EPA extensively in the manufacturing sector, the marginal cost of compliance was typically low, but only once the process was set up.
>so it’s never free trade at fault, it’s lack of international cooperation on environmental policies.
I’m mostly with you here, I place a great deal of the blame on corrupt politicians in the West. But I disagree that it’s not the fault of free trade. Free trade is an animal and globalism is its handler. Globalism in the west has failed to rein in the beast that is the free market. Leaders pay plenty of lip service to the human cost of things and the environment. But as the dominant species on the planet we should be striving to prevent rising cultures from making the same mistakes that cultures who have already lifted themselves up made. Our planet can’t take us all following the same path.
I strongly believe and advocate that Western countries should band together and form a trade union based on occupational safety and environmental protection. Because until they do that, I see all of the liberal grandstanding about saving the environment and wanting things made safely as nothing but fraud. These departments do little but shift the damage somewhere else, and I care not at all where the person getting cancer from the mine is from, or who pours chemicals into the water. I care that it happens at all.
>your arguments are made disingenuously by labor unions.
Well I’m really not sure if it’s important that they make it disingenuously, but I will certainly agree that enforcing minimum wage in other countries is ridiculous. And I’m all for offshoring when it’s a good fit, but if a product is sold in a country it should be manufactured following the same environmental and occupational safety regulations as the country in which it is to be sold. I’m 100% for bringing up poorer countries, but we should be strongly disincentivizing avoiding automation in favor of loosely regulated human capital. I’ve watched many manufacturing businesses get killed in the US as a result of these sorts of regulations, and it’s horrifying to me. It’s super sad to see a US manufacturing sector business die from the proverbial straw, knowing that it will be replaced with a business in another country doing things considerably worse.
So I have a kind of rule about regulation that I also advocate.
If a regulation of a given industry creates a burden, then policy should be adopted to offset that burden either through trade policy(tariffs/duties,ideally as a block of developed nations) or through domestic policy(subsidies or grants to help bring them to compliance).
I disagree that only western countries should be advancing out of these jobs. Human kind as a whole should be advancing out of as many of them as we can, and many times we have the means to do so, but it’s cheaper just to be happy with our community advancing past these jobs.
Let me change your analogy because it is completely unrepresentative of the externalities involved in manufacturing. Say you own a business that happens to produce a bunch of toxic waste that requires dangerous handling, and special payment to dispose of. You don’t want your employees to do it because it’s requires a specially trained employee and having them around increases you workers comp insurance significantly, and they also want hazard pay as a result of their training. Buuut you can go down the street and hire Jo from the corner to take it off your hands for $50. He doesn’t care how dangerous it is, he just needs money for heroin. You can just report that you didn’t produce the waste he’s taking and nobody will be the wiser.
Should you hire Jo to take care of it, or handle it yourself? You understand the danger, know how to handle the material, and have the means to dispose of it in an equitable way to everyone. Would hiring Jo be right, simply because he’d be $50 poorer if I didn’t hire him?