Pick up any item near you, and look on its underside, what do you see? ‘Made in China’, ‘Made in Taiwan’, or sometimes ‘Made in Vietnam’. Most of our clothes and every-day objects were made elsewhere outside the U.S. for dirt-cheap slave-wages. On the flip-side, unemployment rates here in the U.S. are higher than they have been since the great depression. What gives?
The first scapegoat plastic conservative talking-heads would point out are “the immigrants [brown people] are taking our jobs! DEPORT.” Here’s an idea: How about we re-claim the jobs we outsource, rather than being too stingy to actually PAY someone livable wages for their labor? Sure, these are no high-class high-paying jobs, but they’re better than nothing, and nothing is exactly what too many people here have.
I live in New York City, one of the most diverse places in the United States. Cultures, ethnicities, perspectives, and types of people everywhere. People from all over the world, and of all social classes. Walking down the street to a local restaurant, I pass by multi-millionare buisnessmen to disease ridden crack-addicted homeless people and everyone in between all in the same eyefull. If we re-imported alot of these jobs, would that balance out the preceeding picture? Wouldn’t there atleast be a few less homeless people begging for change, and maybe even low-income to poverty-stricken ghetto dwellers might have one more option to consider besides the dangerous and traumatizing lives in crime and the underworld.
We have a standard here; noone gets paid any lower than the state-mandated Minimum Wage. Without lowering it any further, if we re-intergrated some of these outsourced jobs at minimum wage, that may even boost the wages of other occupations. Also, having more american-made products helps bolster our already delapidated economy. It’s a win/win situation, except for maybe the fat-cat higherups who’d have to slice the pie a few more ways, but hey, wouldn’t it be nice to live for the good of the many, not just the [elite] few?
Just food for thought.
