One way American businesses ended up in China, Vietnam, Thailand.

[no_hypocrisy]

I heard this secondhand. Posting so you know that the moves didn't necessarily originate in the Board Rooms of corporations. There was enticement.

My friend is a music teacher. A former student in The Netherlands was working for an American business venture.

And the former student approached my friend, maybe 20 years ago. Offered him a lucrative position to approach American businesses, corporations, etc. to relocate to the Far East. Show them the projections of profit and loss. Offer to pay them to move and to resettle. The former student claimed that his business was booming, and he'd be very pleased to get my friend on board.

My friend politely turned him down, but he was also dismayed by the ethics of bribing American businesses to leavethis country.

[LiberalArkie]

1. Leave the country so that the profit margins increase and then higher executive compensation. Way higher.

[Ritabert]

2. That tracks back to Nixon

He opened trade with China while they were aiding and abetting North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Then came the Bushes. Prescott Bush was the president of the US/China Chamber of Commerce that facilitated selling Chinese-made products in the US. And GHWB was ambassador to China during part of that time.

[LiberalArkie]

5. Yep, been selling out American industry for ever.

[Ritabert]

10. Exactly. It's nothing new and always leads back to Republicans

[readclosely]

3. USA has done for years too

The USA has “ bribed” business to move for years. We call it tax incentives. It is even done for Walmart and ends up helping put the small local run and owned businesses out of business.

[no_hypocrisy]

4. Welcome to DU

[LetMyPeopleVote]

9. Welcome to DU

[marble falls]

11. Let's be clear on who ran small businesses out of thown: those small business shoppers ...

... who went to Walmart. They could have boycotted Walmart and kept small businesses going.

Fuck Walmart for a ton of other reasons, but they didn't run small businesses out of town.

[readclosely]

12. The tax bribes were not offered to the small biz

The small business could not compete. The tax bribes that Walmart got was not given to the small businesses so they were put at a disadvantage from the start. I won’t even get into Walmart’s use of public assistance to allow the bottom teir workers to survive enough to keep alive and work for them.

[marble falls]

13. And those granting any tax relief are from those towns ...

... what Walmart does to it's employees is evil. The US tax payers subsidizes Walmart by paying for social services for underpaid Walmart Employees with less than full time checks and no benefits.

But it has nothing to do with towns people deserting local businesses for cheap products.

Curiously enough, I've lived in small towns where the local pharmacies love Walmart: they made more money working at Walmart and have infinitely less headaches. Walmart does treat pharmacy workers and pharmacists pretty well.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

15. Welcome to DU

[Norrrm]

6. Mitt Romney made a specialty of moving manufacturing overseas.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mitt+romney+moved+businesses+to+china&rlz=1C1AWUC_enUS1014US1023&oq=mitt+romney+moved+businesses+to+china&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCjI3NzQ3ajBqMTWoAgiwAgHxBa81wUZQ0jmC8QWvNcFGUNI5gg&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

[Norrrm]

7. Have the Trumps brought their family products manufacturing back to America?

[Buckeyeblue]

8. Ultimately it was a way to weaken unions but most people didn't care

Once upon a time in our country unions were very strong. Sure they had some strange bed fellows. But unions instituted worker safety rules, paid vacation, sick days, pensions and to some extent job security. Many union negotiated benefits have come law.

By leaving the country to manufacture, businesses didn't have to negotiate with unions. And ultimately reduced the number of people who belonged to unions.

What they return were cheaper products with higher profit margins. And sadly, union and non-union families purchased these products. Way leads on to way, so other manufacturers followed this strategy.

And would also like to say that many parents of gen-xers who worked in factories hated their jobs. They implored their kids to go to college to avoid working in the factories. My dad would, almost daily, tell me how much he hated his job. This was the case for many of my friends. I grew up in a blue collar town. So while the manufacturing jobs were moving away, we didn't care because we didn't want them.

[Prairie Gates]

14. Businesses moved because the labor is cheaper and there was no other way to make profits

In the US, the workers organized and pushed profits to a minimum, mainly because there is no profit other than generating surplus value through the exploitation of (variable) labor. Period, that's it. There's no other source. In other countries, businesses could generate massive surplus value because the labor could be kept extremely cheap and the workers were not permitted to organize.

That's the secret. There is no bribe. It is basic surplus value still, after all these years. It's also why you can't just move manufacturing back to the US. There will be the same demand for decent working conditions and wages that will push profits down. The conditions that have caused the businesses to move to places where they can exploit labor more effectively haven't changed.

The reason Trumpies and Bernie sound so close on this is because they both make the same flawed analysis: if you make it expensive enough to import, the work will come back here. The factories will come back and the businesses will pay union wages and the conditions will be good, etc. They think there's a break point in cost calculations for what a business will pay for shipping and tariffs that will induce repatriation of manufacturing. But there is no such break point. The move offshore was necessary to sustain any profit whatsoever. You can't produce profit at US and European labor rates over an entire economy (i.e., where labor had developed sufficient organization and leverage). Globalization wasn't a choice. It was capitalism's only solution to the falling rate of profit and its acceleration through labor organization. And it is itself failing now, too.