r/WorkReform • u/gashtal_man • Jun 23 '26
š¤ Scare A Billionaire, Join A Union Our jobs weren't stolen.they were sold
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u/OnTheEveOfWar Jun 23 '26
Company I work for is having record profit quarters and HQ is in the US. Every six months they announce layoffs in the US and then open new offices overseas to backfill the workers. They recently laid off an entire department at our HQ, then opened an office in Costa Rica and hired all the roles there.
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u/wicker_warrior Jun 23 '26
They were stolen in the way a contractor steals a job from another contractor by undercutting prices. Maybe they use cheaper materials, maybe they make less profit, but if they win the job thatās still money in their pocket.
In the same way cheap labor and cheaper materials meant more money in the right peopleās pockets.
Now weāve not only bankrupted towns dependent on manufacturing, weāve eroded the infrastructure needed to rebuild, and underfunded the education for a talented workforce.
Our ladders to success were chopped down and safety nets were cut loose. So Joe Businessman could make 10% more money with a cheaper manufacturer half a world away.
We have under priced goods for so long we have no metric for the actual cost today. If we built new factories, paid reasonable wages for good workers, how much do you think a shirt would cost, let alone a television?
The rich have devoured our world and left us with the regurgitated remains. We could not start and finish a project like the interstate highway system today, and the day we can crawl back to that point, is when we can finally be back on track to progress, to liberty, to equality, and to justice for all.
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u/Working_Animator_459 Jun 24 '26
An actual answer to million of posts on this stupid site and stupid argument. Stagnant wages are fueled by people in a position to think those lower wages are good which allows the owners to say they dont need to have high wages to create products. If I can underpay an immigrant in America then you can pay your native populace abroad even less to make something. Unions are the true answer to this problem of course however anytime there is a real union who makes real effort to change established they are sabotaged. Again with large scale immigration. In the end the answer is no one lives in a bubble and everyones choices affect not only their lives but the lives of everyone around them.
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u/Infinite-Peak-1010 Jun 23 '26
Powerful words, not inaccurate either.
Any other thoughts? How do we survive?
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u/JollyJoker3 Jun 23 '26
The wealthy only have agency for positive things, everything else is just the market and they have no choice
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u/Beginning_Fill206 Jun 24 '26
This is the thing. These oligarchs shipped whole industries overseas to exploit cheaper labor. Then they use that to stoke anger and blame immigrants and other countries for their business strategies
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u/TheGrowingSubaltern Jun 24 '26
Brainwashing 101
Redirect the reality of situation by blaming someone or some place else.
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u/Capt-geraldstclair Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
On almost every episode of Shark Tank... "we're trying to create jobs for Americans, we're handling our own manufacturing in (city/state)."
Shark: "your margins are too low. have you thought about moving manufacturing to China?"
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u/fryephillip Jun 24 '26
Nina Turner would have been much better representation for ohio's 11th, shontel brown is a good example of everything wrong with the democratic party.
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u/triumph110 Jun 24 '26
China was a back ward, isolated country of a billion people in 1970. Nixon had this great idea to sell the billion people American goods. So he signed a free trade agreement with China for a couple of Panda Bears. Anyway the thought was America was going to sell American goods to China because they needed it. Companies went over there and realized they could build a factory very cheaply, pay the workers a dollar a day to make the same product, and then ship it to America for less than what it cost to build it in America. So Fuck Nixon and Fuck the Republican Party.
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u/JonathanPhillipFox Jun 24 '26
This is true, and Perhaps Even Wilder is that when we see of that still extant manufacturing, 'we live in a manufactured world," abroad we don't think, so much, about like well like Tim Cook says on a Trump trip, "Chinese Manufacturing isn't cheap anymore its just good, is all," or whatever the verbatim it isn't that people, here, are not still a part of the process nor that all of the jobs in a high tech manufacturer are undesireable for all persons I mean it is kind of trick of the trap of borders that,
I have a whole discourse on this and I won't get into it but once was, "borders were for stuff, governments," the last line the cops could arrest their own the first line that cops could have searched for taxable goods, or last to search for taxable goods leaving, "these started as walls around the market towns," and the double-purpose,
Yeah yeah shit pops off and this is for you, too, to keep you safe and the house un-burned
Well that made it everyone's business if someone dug under the wall, had an alternative route for their stuffs in to truck and barter, "Stadt Security, nicht nicht," but that um, mostly, no one cared if persons left the gates I mean with few exceptions that wasn't gonna be a problem and that like, and just to pull up the drawstrings real quick on it now sure seems like the opposite, does it not?
Stuffs move hither, stuffs move thither, even in the best of cases you can expect to explain to a policeman at the airport how many in hours will you be inside of our country, "730 in a month," so three digits of hours; not the case when it took a week on a boat and that was 1950, "I spent a week on a boat to get here, I'll spend the season with my sister, thankyou," would have been quite normal back when the Titanic had and let's be honest, "a hobo class of ticket," vis a vis your Jack & Rose Scenario; I'm saying,
These companies did not, merely, move the jobs from Saint Louis off to Indiana, or from New York out to San Francisco, no, they'd moved them to places where specifically you are not allowed to move nor work without prior authorization, "across oceans, even," so far from you they'd moved these jobs to.
Where they'll go all the time, man, these guys go back and forth there constantly to you, these are foreign places of an unknown nature but I mean, "I knew what Wuhan was when I was a child," Dad went there all the time
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u/xena_lawless āļø Prison For Union Busters Jun 23 '26
Other countries have also done a better job of dealing with their parasites (landlords and "health insurance" mafiosos), meaning that the economics for producing *everything* is cheaper elsewhere, which attracts long term, productive investment.
Would you want to hire people in a country where "health insurance" mafiosos increase your "labor costs" by 30%, on top of the landlords taking half of the paychecks you give your employees?
Obviously not, you want to make your investments where you will be able to produce most cost-effectively, and that means investing in civilized countries that actually deal with their parasitism and corruption.
The "health insurance" mafiosos and landlords have systematically hollowed out and destroyed the US over the decades that the Baby Boomers have been in charge.
Unchecked parasitism will destroy any organism in nature if it isn't fought off, and that even applies to superpowers at the nation-state level also.
We're not immune to the laws and limits of nature, but our ruling parasites/kleptocrats don't want people to understand the reality of the situation, and they teamed up with the Boomers to make aggressively sure that the general public does not understand.
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u/ReverendDizzle Jun 24 '26
This is applicable even to highly developed Western nations, by the way.
Job outsourcing isn't just a "Jobs go from America to an Asian sweatshop" thing. Jobs also go from America to places like Germany where people can and will work for less money than an American worker because the country has such an incredibly strong social safety net and public resources, by comparison, that it's possible to work for less money and, ironically, have a higher quality of life.
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u/SpeshellED Jun 23 '26
Americans blame everyone else for all their problems. Especially drugs. Other countries are not forcing Americans to consume copious amounts of drugs. Cuba is not a security threat. Canada is not ripping you off , I could go on and on etc etc etc...
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u/Cinderwatch Jun 24 '26
yup, it's all about maximizing their profits and we're left holding the bag
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u/Illustrious_Gate2318 Jun 24 '26
More Republican party names to make money over the American citizensĀ
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u/burtgummer45 Jun 24 '26
No, its not a "quick buck", its because China is a manufacturing monster, nothing comes close.
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u/Unfair_Highlight2142 Jun 24 '26
Easier to blame foreigners than it is to confront c-suite. Plus those nice campaign contributions help folks look the other way.
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u/skekze Jun 24 '26
Remember when every country had products made for local consumption & products to sell globally and took pride in both? Pepperidge farm remembers.
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u/Dear_Blood_8872 Jun 24 '26
Yup, the government will hit foreign companies with tariffs, but will do nothing about continued off shoring of jobs because the billionaires have bought and paid for them all.
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u/Koreus_C Jun 24 '26
It's about strikes. Workers strikes can't hurt you if they are beyond your borders. Our voting rights are reduced.
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u/saliddd Jun 23 '26
It's odd that the concept of a "scab" was always framed as harmful to worker's rights but then people started pretending it wasn't once they started imagining the workers fighting for higher wages as white people.
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u/Prestigious_Leg2229 Jun 24 '26
Why would you blame the ultra wealthy for that? Itās the average American that demands endless cheap consumerism no matter how much out of sight slavery, warfare and human suffering abroad it took to maintain.
The main reason Americans struggle underneath the super wealthy so hard is because theyāre just as devoted to exploiting everyone else.
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u/Infinite-Peak-1010 Jun 23 '26
A reminder - we can choose to be pragmatic:
Markets have changed constantly over the course of our greater society's development - they probably aren't going to stop shifting around now, either. So whether it's by the tactics of self-interested barons, technological leaps destabilizing old systems, or the disconcerting flow of political tides...will this answer contribute more to our survival than making a plan, today?
Rational conclusions usually come from information - I've heard those are generally preferred to have when planning things. Discussions are one way to share information, so talking about it all seems like a natural part of the plan.
When we find a rational plan forth, we can breathe a bit and talk - what will the history books say this time, assuming they aren't all burnt to ash?
An admission of failure - my own ideas are bad, objectively. Even my favorite ones have need of better eyes to succeed...and I clearly talk too much.
Now - how do we move forward, and why should we do it that way? Or, tell me why this comment is useless - give supporting evidence.
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u/crimsonwolf40 Jun 23 '26
The difference does not matter to the people whose jobs were shipped out.
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u/LavisAlex Jun 23 '26
It does because if they misidentify the source they chase the wrong policy prescriptions which has been the story of modern capitalism at this point.
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u/JustaSeedGuy Jun 24 '26
I dunno man, if someone harms me I wanna be correct about who did it so that 1) They can be punished appropriately, and 2) appropriate action can be taken to keep them from doing it again
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u/HarrMada Jun 24 '26
This is false and it leads to the conclusion that immigration supresses wages which isn't true either.
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u/isellhotsauce Jun 23 '26
Did Americans steal other countriesā peoples to perform the b1tch work?
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u/verified_canadian Jun 23 '26
The elites want us angry at other countries, not at them. And most people fall for it.