| richardhutnik said:
Wages are just another expense for a business. Bringing in more profits guarantees NOTHING in regards to employees getting more. Companies also don't just hire, because they have more money. The only thing, short of laws that are passed, or unions doing collective bargaining, which will cause employers to pay more, or hire more, is if there is competition for labor. Without such competition, there isn't improved benefits. And corporations will look everywhere for the cheapest labor everywhere. Also, people need to knock off this "but but but, you can't do that... it will cost jobs". Companies are looking for any excuse to cut headcount. Even when times are good, and companies report record profits, they will still lay people off. And no, the question to ask isn't: "How do we improve the education, skills and experience of the American work force?" Because these questions don't matter to corporations. They will hire as cheap as possible. The American workforce, from a hard working and productivity standpoint, is near the top of the world. This doesn't matter, because corporations find it much cheaper to hire in India and China. To compete with them, you drive the standard of living of Americans to the level of India and China. And companies will find it cheaper to hire on pennies on the dollar and train workers there, particularly using American manpower they will let go, than to use American labor. |
I don’t think you understood what I was saying. In my industry (software development) there was a trend by many companies to offshore work to cheaper firms in India, but because of the costs and problems associated with that many companies are repatriating those jobs; and my current job is an example of that. When I was hired the intention of my company was to replace the 15 software developers who were maintaining a product in India with 3 to 5 software developers in Canada, and after I was able to manage the workload of this product by myself with (roughly) 50% of my workload while improving relations with our clients it became clear how poor of a business decision offshoring was.
... Or to put it another way, maintaining the lowest cost to do business is typically unrelated to hiring the lowest paid workers
Now, on the other hand, if you have a Union that has pushed the hourly wages of individuals who can't read, write or do basic arithmetic to $76/hour and you can get 85% the productivity from an employee in china earning $2/hour it will be difficult to keep that job in North America
