Isn’t it the opposite? Free trade has ended like you wanted, but it didn’t make things better
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. We were right. We said jobs would go to low cost countries, hollowing out Canadian manufacturing. They did. The rich got richer and everyone else got poorer. And now resurgent populism.
I guess the question is what we need to do next.
I always liked the idea of globalizing rights: free trade with countries that have similar labour and environmental standards. Maybe that’s the next move? Or are we back to bespoke tariffs on everyone?
I think realistically the best case scenario is bespoke tariffs plus resurgence in union density and militancy. Our own labor standards are too low for sustainability at this point so teaming up with other countries with similar standards would still not solve the issue at home. We’re still on an uptrend when it comes to inequality and we know it leads to instability at some threshold. We need to significantly curb the amount of money/wealth going to the top and instead direct it to the working class.
The only way to curb wealth going to the top is taxes on their wealth/income… Tariffs help with labour outsourcing, but not with wealth inequality…
I suppose a guillotine would help with wealth inequality as well though…
Taxes would definitely work, if there are politicians who campaign on those and get elected. The problem is that politicians more often than not represent the upper class. So they sell other ideas instead. This is why I’m not confident we’ll be able to curb inequality via the democratic system. What we can do however is what we did the last time around - use our labor power. Use labor power to get much more of the profits, use both labor power and some of those profits to hire politicians to get those tax laws passed on top. Could it happen that we get some party to elect a leader who’s the type of ideologue that gains popular support and passes such laws before labor power forces them to? Yes. I’d like that, it’s easier. I don’t think it’s very likely though. Just look at the state of the NDP over the last decade.
Random tariffs seems the most likely.
I’m not sure that I agree with the labour standards thing. We may be lacking in some areas, but I expect we’re better than the global south, and China’s 996.
We need to significantly curb the amount of money/wealth going to the top and instead direct it to the working class.
I definitely agree with that. Wasn’t there some global tax treaty that recently fizzled out?
I didn’t downvote.
As for labor standards, consider the last few strikes the Canadian government broke instead of staying out, or leaning in favor of labor. Or the nursing wage freezes for years and years in Ontario, including the bill that curbed ability to strike which needed the notwithstanding clause. The state of our labor protection is not the worst in the world but it is nowhere near the best, and more importantly, it’s not where it needs to be in order to curb the trend or rising inequality.
E: BTW, as that article says, 996 has been ruled illegal in China. Whether and how that is enforced today and in the future is an open question. That said I recently looked at wages in China and they’ve been growing at 8-10% per year, every year since the 80s. The average wage is currently sitting at a bit over US $15K per year. Adjusted for purchase power, it’s equivalent to $55K in the US. I was shocked, but that explains the great number of Chinese tourists I saw in Italy last summer. The Chinese worker today is getting much more than they did just 5 or 10 years ago and the trend has been like this for a long time. Another angle you could use to cross check this is their Gini index. It’s peaked at 44 at in 2010. The last number I can see is 35.7 from 2021. That means inequality is falling and therefore more of the economic growth is going towards the majority. That’s congruent with the rising wages. For context, this unadjusted wage is about the same as the poorest country in the EU, Bulgaria. However adjusted for PPP, Bulgaria’s wage is equivalent to US $30K. That means economically, the average Chinese worker seems significantly better off than the average Bulgarian worker, while their absolute incomes are about the same. Again this is simply the wage side of things, ignoring other working conditions like hours, safety and so on. I don’t have enough information about those other than the common things people say.
I didn’t downvote.
lol. Ty. Lemmy has a problem with the disagree button. 😂
As for labor standards…
You raise good points. I feel like Canada has decent regulations, and when they’re enforced, it’s probably better than most of the places we’ve exported jobs to. I don’t have anything backing that up.
However, our governments definitely don’t take the side of workers in strikes. I’m not sure how that stacks up overall. If workers (generally) can’t be forced into overtime, how does that stack up to the feds enacting back to work legislation for trail workers?
Googling around, it seems like 996 may still be a thing, and court rulings are inconsistent and enforcement is lax.
There was. No idea where it’s at. I don’t think that would achieve the goal, at least not in the current climate. Unions can, by extracting much more of the profits of companies, leaving less to accumulate at the top. That also solves the income tax problem since it effectively acts as a tax on the owner class income.
I was thinking of the Global Minimum Tax, an international agreement to set corporate tax to at least 15%. That’s been nixed by Trump.
Yeah, that’s the one, worked on by the OECD. rip
I don’t get this article, is it assuming that everyone thought globalization was a good thing?
I’m pretty sure what happened was politicians just did it and gaslit everyone saying it will be good for the economy.
Globalization IS a good thing. Many people didn’t like globalization and free trade because while being a huge productivity boost overall it was also a large wealth transfer to many of the poorest nations on Earth. And they used this math to make some very convincing arguments that we were “falling behind” and “living standards were declining” and maybe in some cases the speed of that wealth transfer did go too far. But mostly what was really happening was simply that other countries were catching up and this is not a bad thing unless you consider those people sub-human.
I don’t consider people in other countries sub-human so I think our goal should be to make the entire world a nice and equitable place to live for everybody, because having a nice world that everyone can live in benefits us personally and the rising tide will lift all boats and we can finally start to put all this horror and war and injustice behind us and try to focus on things that actually improve our civilization together. This is not a zero sum game, we do not have to steal from the very poor to make our own poor richer, we can gradually fix the historical inequality to bring everybody up to the same level without causing too much stress to ourselves if we just adjust our expectations a little and frame it in the right way.
The thing that was actually bad about free trade was that some very non-democratic, non-free countries abused it, monopolized manufacturing of entire industries and bribed us with very cheap products about it so we didn’t mind very much. We let our enemies, actual enemies who abuse their own populations and want to destroy us and take everything in the world for themselves and abuse us too, use it against us. It’s not free trade that’s bad, it’s the tyrants running these evil despotic regimes that we are too lazy and peaceful to do anything about. They lied to us and pretended that they were being reasonably democratic and we knew they were sort of lying but we gave them a passing grade anyway and let them carry on. Nobody minds that they torture their own people or work them to death when they’re importing their nice cheap goods at a great price.
It seems like we hoped that if we provided them a good economy, freedom would follow. But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Freedom must come first, then economy can follow. By tolerating evil, by letting free trade support and provide for that evil, we allowed that evil to infect us and now we’re feeling the pain of what evil left unchecked will do to the world.
So now it’s time to prepare for a war to defeat evil once again, because we let it happen.
Globalization IS a good thing.
Nope. If something can be produced locally, you would pay less transportation costs.
By definition, it’s less work to access goods and services that are closer, unless your country can’t produce it, then you outsource.
is it assuming that everyone thought globalization was a good thing?
Yes. And many did. The 1988 election was mostly about free trade with the US, which the pro-free trade party won. The general assumption was that some people would lose their jobs, but prices would go down.
And that’s what happened. But it turns out that lots of people lost their jobs, and certain sectors shrank dramatically.
But we got more coffee shoplocations.
Oh shit most of those are now staffed by TFWs. ⚰️
Globalism is based. Free trade is based.
Yeah, I have a feeling national security and a possible fascist takeover of the US wasn’t their main bone to pick.
The argument seems to be “I think free trade is bad. It led to a shitload of prosperity for everyone involved, but now that people are projecting their personal grievances onto free trade and undermining it by electing an isolationist nationalist, things are going to get worse. Told ya so.” Feels like hella cope to me lol.
Yeah, I just read it. There’s no attempt to actually defend the connection between globalisation and Trump, let alone claim they saw it coming. To the contrary:
It’s looking like we were right – only in ways we didn’t predict.
That’s a funny definition of “right”. Usually knowledge is regarded as having to be both true and well founded, and definitely directly about the thing in question. As per usual with activists, though, sides are the only thing that matter, not factual accuracy.
The argument against free trade was that it would suck decent jobs out of high cost/high regulation countries, and replace them with near-slavery jobs in low cost/low regulation countries.
Generally, this has occurred: developed countries have lost jobs in manufacturing. It seems possible that developing countries did a little better than we expected, but I’m not too familiar with that.
It led to a shitload of prosperity for everyone involved
For the already rich, yes. For the rest of us, no. Inequality in the developed world increased significantly in the past few decades. I don’t think that can be entirely attributed to free trade agreements, but they contributed.
Those jobs that got moved overseas, generally were replaced with much better jobs. Value added complex manufacturing, tech, service, research, healthcare. No one wants to mine coal or manufacture widgets. Of course some people slipped through the cracks and we have wealth inequality, so we should pay taxes (especially the rich) to fund a social safety net.
It seems possible that developing countries did a little better than we expected, but I’m not too familiar with that.
You know how China’s rich enough to scare other world powers now? Yeah, that’s because of big-earning and well-paying (relative to traditional subsistence farming) offshore jobs.
Without the option to export things to rich countries in exchange for things we can make but they can’t (yet), third-world countries are stuck in a cycle of poverty. No money to pay for education or new enterprises, which leads to another generation of dysfunction, which saps away the money for education and enterprises.
I suppose India, Indonesia and Pakistan might be big enough to follow the Stalin path of state-importing contractors and prefab factories from the developed world instead, but I doubt anyone else is - the amount of money that takes is just crazy, and by definition they’re starting with not a lot per capita.
For the already rich, yes. For the rest of us, no.
We’d still be back in the days where buying a new outfit was a very major investment, if it had to be spun and woven here instead of in Bangladesh. If you buy cheap imports, you do benefit.
You could argue that globalisation has caused wages to stagnate at the same time, but there’s other possible culprits even for that - poor competition, a trend away from progressive taxation, and just the fact that the rich usually get richer in peacetime.
Also, I’d like to say, as a Western poor person I’ve got nothing on the starving Africans.
During the FTAA talks (and before), we were pushing for fair trade - saying that free trade between countries with similar labour and environmental regulations is fine.
We said that for all the reasons you mentioned: real investment can build a middle class and improve people’s lives.
The thing we objected to with the trade agreements is that they would enrich oligarchs and screw workers.
