I’ve been a big shot in several giant corporations, several smaller ones, and a consultant on finance, business operations, HR and employee benefits to many more, aside from running my own business.
I’ve never seen a situation where excessive labor demands or behavior was not the fault of poor management. Once launched on grievance and then power seeking by labor, a downward spiral ensues. Sometimes management reforms, often not. Eventually, the business fails and all suffer.
When there are more effective competitors, that process is speeded.
Surviving US companies have met that competition by becoming more efficient in their processes or by sending manufacturing abroad for cheaper labor, or both devising better processes and sending it abroad to foreign factories or outsourcers.
US labor unions used to be very effective in developing free unions in poorer countries, as a bulwark against exploitive communist unions and to defend our prosperity in a freer world. Today, they are adamant against foreign outsourcing while refusing to become partners in US efficiencies, but have lost their position in all but government unions and similar where they can exert a monopoly granted by paid-off politicians. They do fight for fairer labor standards in free trade agreements, but mostly to impede outsourcing rather than to encourage free trade.
Free trade should not be an issue, as all benefit, us from cheaper products and focusing investments where we have a comparative advantage, foreign workers from getting a leg on the ladder to better living conditions than in rural drudgery and exploitation by local thugocrats.
We are not in the early 1900s, and shouldn’t blithely feel that eventually foreign workers will be in a better position. And we are Americans and do not believe in undue exploitation of others. We are in a faster, communicative world which does not wait decades and, further, the image of the US is more important when native populations and not just their elites are our audience and affect our own economic and national security interests.
Added: Child Labor and Chocolate
US companies have frequently seen their seeming advantages of outsourcing abroad be transitory, leading to jumping to another country to be more exploitive or back to the US to be more effectively run. Others have continued to be profitable and have stable operations abroad. The latter are those with American sensitivities to labor standards, which also tends to result in superior products, rather than just exploitation.
A US businessman is not a “great man” – regardless of media puffery -- if he just gains profits or mouths platitudes, whether liberal or laissez faire. A ‘great man” is one who brings value to labor, investors and the US lasting prosperity and decencies. That requires more than a fast buck, or wonder technology. That requires the vision and work to respect workers, wherever they be. Anything less is self-defeatingly exploitive, of others and the ideologically gullible who don't pay adequate attention to our values or short and long term interests.
