Well, it's not like onshoring lower value-added manufacturing jobs on a large scale will improve their lives. How much are they paid in McDonald's or Starbucks now? $2K? $3K?
Surprise. US average McDonaldz wage is $10 an hour. Starbugs is better, at around $12 nationwide, with $16 in Washington, because of its high minimum wage. No so far off from what restaurant servers get in an upscale establishments in China.
Can those manufacturing jobs pay them higher and offer similar levels of job security? And if so, where's the competitiveness? You can't sell overseas because many other countries are cheaper and can undercut you.
One forum member here asked me how much pain it will be to setup a very, very basic turnkey PCB line in Pakistan. The answer was a great lot of pain. With $100k investment, one has nothing to do in EMS industry.
Even making "crappy plasticky toys," takes much more skill, effort, and money than how much credit is usually given to the industry.
Look, how Vietnam tries to undercut us for 2 decades. The total light industry output of Vietnam was like of 1 district of Dongguang.
You can't compete with cheap imports in the domestic market as well, unless you drastically increase your tariffs. But by increasing tariffs you increase the general cost of living too, which again hurt the bottom workers, as well as compromising the competitiveness of the whole economy.
You can, try to find a single widget which has its production efficiency being limited by labour supply?
Even the low volume, hand assembled pieces of machinery are only, at maximum, 20% labour cost. Anything moderately well automated is just few percents labour.
