The White House is insisting that Donald Trump’s vision of Apple’s flagship iPhones being manufactured in the US will come to fruition, despite assertions from analysts and the company itself that it would not be possible.
The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters during Tuesday’s briefing that the president believed Apple’s recently announced $500bn investment, as well as increasing import costs sparked by his trade tariffs, would encourage the company to ramp up manufacturing in the US.
“He believes we have the labor, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it. If Apple didn’t think the US could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change,” she said.
Yeah this whole defending cheap foreign labor thing feels kind of weird to me. I might just be showing my ignorance here, but isn’t the end-game for globalization about raising living standards around the world? By trading with developing countries, the investment develops their middle class and eventually their wages should catch up with ours.
It feels weird to see people saying that so much of the American economy is suddenly unviable when we have to pay livable wages. If that’s the case, that’s a bad thing, and it should change. Not that I think these tariffs are the solution.
As I understand it, these sweatshop jobs do resist the standard of living in the areas they are in. The people there don’t have the option to work a job that we would consider good. They work the job we consider terrible, and they get paid more than they would doing other jobs.
To make a moral judgement, we must balance between “terrible working conditions, no protections, maximum wealth extraction,” on the one hand, and “no infrastructure, no job, no money” on the other. Sadly, there is no profit in making the world better for everyone.