Alibaba's Jack Ma backs down from promise to Trump to bring 1 million jobs to the US

[Benton]

(09-20-2018, 02:05 PM)Au165 Wrote: The balance has already tipped to some low margin industries. Robots are the real threat to low skill labor not other countries. The enemy has never been other countries it has always been technology. Technology has killed manufacturing here because we simply don't need as many people here to do labor intensive jobs. Very mundane repetitive tasks that take 4 humans overseas get done by one here using a machine. The funny thing is the Tariffs hurt most the people they look to help in that the increases that get passed on are, in relation to salary, the biggest to the low income. I'd argue we take all the money we are about to lose from the retaliatory tariffs and continue to use it for skilled based job training. 


It's a shell game, the retaliation from someone like China cancels out anything we are gaining it's just moving who is affected by it. Everyone still pays in the increased goods department though, some may just not have jobs now to pay the increases. Well unless we bail out every industry like we did the farmers. 

With respect, I think you're hung up on technology killing all the jobs.

Does it? Sure. It always has. But it likewise creates jobs. 

And that's not what I'm talking about, and doesn't really have to do with moving jobs done by people overseas. How many jobs? It's hard to tell as there's direct employers and indirect providers with few rules governing reporting, but conservative estimates are a few million jobs held overseas.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-u-s-companies-reveal-how-much-they-rely-on-overseas-workers-1523448000

Quote:Now, thanks to a new regulatory mandate affecting publicly traded companies, big multinationals are revealing fresh details about how many people they employ in the U.S. and to what extent some of the most recognizable American brands rely on workers in lower-cost countries.


Kellogg Co., the maker of Frosted Flakes and Pop-Tarts, employs nearly 20,000 people, or 59% of its workforce, overseas. At fruit and vegetable producer Fresh Del Monte ProduceInc., FDP -0.06% 80% of workers live and work in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Kenya and the Philippines.

...

Apparel company Hanesbrands Inc., whose global workforce has increased by 21% since 2010, already discloses in its annual report how many of its workers are based in the U.S., where head count has shrunk. Its proportion of overseas workers rose last year to 88% of 67,200 employees overall, compared with 85% of 55,500 workers in 2010.
...

Between 2000 and 2015, the most recent year that Commerce Department data is available, American multinationals hired 4.3 million people in the U.S. but added even more jobs—6.2 million—overseas. In total, U.S. multinationals in 2015 employed 28.3 million people domestically and 14.1 million abroad.

Worth noting from the article, not all those jobs are leaving because of cheap labor, some are just open markets.

We'll get to the battles against Skynet. But that's not the problem right now.