Free Trade and Globalization failing the working (80%?) class

GreatApe

Lots of talk in the media of how Free trade and globalization is/has failed the domestic working class and the Trump/Brexit is a backlash to it. What is the view on this subsection of the forum?

Is the working class worse off now vs the past? Really think hard are they? If yes why?

Are/were manufacturing jobs that great? and did they die off due to china/elsewhere exporting stuff or did they die off due to the vast productivity improvements in manufacturing over the last generation?

If free trade could be reversed how many jobs would 'return' and how many of our exporting jobs would be lost and what would the net number be?

michaels

Isn't there a world bank / imf paper stating this - basically looking at income performance by global decile and the losers were the 8th decile - the developed worlds poor.

Conrad

As a right winger I am ever more interested in the effects of globalisation, particularly on the mass of self employed trades and working class jobs.

Us Humans create reality, and the time has come to do so with vigour. Mass immigration is a disaster on many fronts, and the downsides far outweigh the positives.

The other main front we must address is bringing about a flourishing of enterprise focused on giving people meaningfull dignified lives, and less of the non jobs produced by importing Chinese knickers

I do not agree we just throw up our hands and give in, no, we must and will address this evolution

GreatApe

Conrad wrote: »

As a right winger I am ever more interested in the effects of globalisation, particularly on the mass of self employed trades and working class jobs

what did that string of words together say?

Us Humans create reality

what?

, and the time has come to do so with vigour.

are you this sub forums empty statements warrior?

Mass immigration is a disaster on many fronts, and the downsides far outweigh the positives.

This was not a question of immigration but the advantages or disadvantages of erecting new trade barriers/quotas and what if anything this will do to help the working class

The other main front we must address is bringing about a flourishing of enterprise focused on giving people meaningful dignified lives,

is your life currently undignified? whos life is undignified that you are going to give them dignity and how?

and less of the non jobs produced by importing Chinese knickers

can you please list your non jobs. Is selling knickers a non job or is it only if they are Chinese knickers? do we ban knickers or only Chinese ones

I do not agree we just throw up our hands and give in, no, we must and will address this evolution

try reading out aloud your sentences record yourself and play it back and if you can make any sense of them come back and explain it to the rest of us

GreatApe

michaels wrote: »

Isn't there a world bank / imf paper stating this - basically looking at income performance by global decile and the losers were the 8th decile - the developed worlds poor.

A quick google search does not show this paper.

Its quite hard to compare like with like. I used to work in heavy industry and the workforce declined to 1/30th of its size per unit of output while output actually grew so it was the robots that took the jobs not the Chinese

There are some exceptions to this for instance textiles is still largely manpower based. There are machines and some improvement but it has not gone the way of say steel making or car making or electronics which have seen maybe 20-200x productivity improvements over a generation. Even in time textiles will face the advanced robots and I think within 20 years 95% of human jobs in textiles will be done by robots.

The lost jobs to robots and cheap foreign labor have also allowed domestic goods to become cheaper and this is surely a huge benefit especially for the poor. Would phasing in a ban on robots to be replaced by hand made xyz be a good idea? surely not its clearly a step back in productivity. what about phasing in a ban on importing say shoes. Would producing 150 million shoes a year domestically for maybe ~£3B a year rather than importing them for £1.5B a year be a good move? I guess it would create 50,000 shoe making jobs but the higher shoe prices would destroy jobs and investment elsewhere in the economy as consumers need to pay £1.5 billion more for shoes rather than say costa coffees. Is a min wage job in a shoe factory any better than the same at a coffee shop? I suppose if we could selectively do this type of thing we would be at a benefit but foreign nations would do the same and bar our exports. So maybe they would ban financial imports to create their own financial industries. We create 50,000 shoe making jobs, destroy 25,000 costa cofee jobs and destroy 25,000 finance jobs. Maybe Conrad sees coffee shops and offices of financial workers as undignified and wants to swap them for shoe manufacturing jobs but it seems silly to me

antrobus

GreatApe wrote: »

Lots of talk in the media of how Free trade and globalization is/has failed the domestic working class and the Trump/Brexit is a backlash to it. What is the view on this subsection of the forum?....

That change always involves winners and losers.

GreatApe wrote: »

...Is the working class worse off now vs the past? Really think hard are they? If yes why?...

The working class in China are clearly a lot better off now compared to the past. There are something like 600 to 800 million of 'em that have been taken put of poverty as a result of the adoption of good old fashioned capitalism. That's a lot of people.

GreatApe wrote: »

..Are/were manufacturing jobs that great? and did they die off due to china/elsewhere exporting stuff or did they die off due to the vast productivity improvements in manufacturing over the last generation?....

Both.

GreatApe wrote: »

..If free trade could be reversed how many jobs would 'return' and how many of our exporting jobs would be lost and what would the net number be?

Economic growth is driven by trade and technology. You don't make things better in the long run by messing around with either.

michaels

GreatApe wrote: »

A quick google search does not show this paper.

None the less google is your friend.

http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/10/25/The-Winners-and-Losers-of-Globalization-Finding-a-Path-to-Shared-Prosperity

Although I think there is also something else more recent.

TrickyTree83

I don't think Brexit or the US election narrative that it's a vote against globalism is correct, it may have had a hand in it but it's my belief that people are fed up with a brand of politics that victimises criminals, promotes the over use of adjectives like rape-apologist, racist, homophobic, etc... from a section of society with no consequence or reproach. The intolerance of the self-proclaimed tolerant and the pervasiveness of their dogma throughout institutions and academia, indoctrinating generation after generation that they can identify as a goat rather than male or female or that they somehow have a right to not be offended in any way, shape or form. This runs against the pillar of western democracy that is free speech.

michaels

If you compare the US election results to the final polls it is the 'rust belt' states where Trumps support exceeded the pollsters predictions, the 'latino' southern/southeastern states went pretty much as predicted.

I have not seen the turnout figures but it would be interesting to see if Clinton scored fewer votes than expected in these states or if it was that there was a surge in turnout from the 'don't usually votes' that saw him over the line - ie was it a mirror image of Brexit?

bugslet

GreatApe wrote: »

Is the working class worse off now vs the past? Really think hard are they? If yes why?

Can't answer the big picture, but in a re-run of previous comments. If you are an international haulier, then you've seen trade decimated by being part of the EU.

Page 2 - the rest of it's a tax change

https://www.rha.uk.net/getmedia/286caffa-ec96-4fa8-9a4d-459e86a5b50f/HMRC-imposes-changes-to-overnight-allowance-rules.pdf.aspx

The additional costs on UK firms will make them less competitive with foreign hauliers, at a time when UK market share of international work is at an all-time low (12%) and foreign hauliers’ share of the domestic market has risen by almost 50% in two years, according to official statistics from the Department for Transport.

Haulage has two main costs, fuel and pay. Fuel costs the same as any haulier fuels up at the cheapest point*, wages though are where the competition comes in and a UK haulier can't compete with the wages the East EU pays. A few years back, Willi Betz was paying his drivers £320.00 a month and £20.00 a week in Aldi vouchers at the time I was paying my drivers more than that a week.

Of course in driving down costs to the consumer it's great, but if you are a driver, you are seeing your pay suppressed and as an International UK haulier, I appear to be a dying breed.

To my mind, it's slightly different to off-shoring, when the work is being done in the UK, by a company that exists in another country with a completley different cost base.

That's more of a local example than you want, but I'm just a glorified trucker rather than a macro economist.


*Edit as I realise I'm partially wrong. If you are a domestic haulier only, then you buy fuel in the UK only, if you are a East EU, you'll have bought fuel abroad and still be running on that fuel in the UK.

michaels

Interesting that it would appear that the NMW does not apply to workers of foreign companies who are effectively working in the UK - I wonder if other industries could exploit this too?