On my last post, I was talking about the serious bullshits you have to put up with if you want to get educated these days. Getting into serious debt to pay for it, long hours of sleepless nights, intake of drugs to get a competitive edge over your classmates, the list goes on and on. But that’s not all. These days Not only do you have to worry about your student debts, you also have to worry about rising housing costs, rising food and rising energy costs. It’s no wonder why so many people is in serious debt these days. No one can afford to live anymore! To make matters worse, there’s no jobs out there and this is what this first post of two will talk about.
Lets look back in the 1950s. The way I see the 1950s, it was an interesting time then when compared to today. After the end of the 2nd world war, It was the dawn of the middle class society. Men who where fighting in the war had returned home and they where kind of horny. Birth rates exploded then to what we know today as the Baby Boomers. Also during that time, there was factories popping up everywhere producing everything from furniture to children’s toys to kitchen appliances to automobiles all dotted though out North America. These factories offered good paying jobs and finding work for the most part was easy to find because they where all over the place. It was very typical to graduate high school and have a job tell retirement at the factory!
Because families earned good money during that time, they could afford a nice big house in the suburbs, that was very affordable. They could afford a car, they could afford cool new technologies at the time like televisions and fully furnish the house at the same time. Electricity and water for the most part was cheap and most importantly, you where still able to feed your family every day and still had plenty of money left over to save. It’s no wonder why everyone in the 50s looked so happy.
Education was cheap back then. If you didn’t want to work at a factory, you could have gone on to university and it would have cost you no more than a few thousand dollars even in today’s money. After you graduate, you could then get a management, or an R&D job at the company who ran the factory in your hometown.
Housing for the most part was affordable back then. If you where some newly married couple, you would have gone to a bank and take out a 10 or 20 year mortgage to pay off that house. These days, its common to hear of 40 year mortgages! It’s ridiculous!
So back then, you would have been able to live a very comfortable, secure life with a steady flow of income. Back then you had a job for life! Sadly, things have changed so much since then. And in my opinion, It’s all of are faults for these changes.
Back in the last two decades, something happened. All those factories that offers well paying secure jobs to it’s employees started to go. Where did they go? To China! China suddenly became the place to be to get your stuff manufactured for dirt cheap compared to getting it made domestically. Customers and consumers of these products loved them because of how much less they where compared to competing products that where made ether in Canada or USA. Companies took notice of this and in the last 20 to 25 years, almost everything that was made that you can possibly think of is now made in China. You have giant retailers like Walmart that demands the lowest possible price by manufactures to make them products to sell and consumers fall in love with those retailers because of how dirt cheap there stuff is.
So basically, in order to compete while still earning profits, you as a company have to move your factories to china and leaves those who spent all there lives working at a factory to basically find some other place to work or end up with a minimum wage kind of job like McDonalds or Walmart.
So who do you blame? Well, as I previously said, I blame everyone!
I blame you as a consumer! For years you have demanded the lowest price on that TV. For years you demanded that toaster in your kitchen should not cost $50. instead you wanted it at $14.99 at Walmart. For years you wanted PC’s to cost under $1000 so PC manufactures then closed there factories here and moved them to china and now PC’s cost under $700.
It’s because of the consumer’s aggressive demand for cheap chinese goods factories have closed.
I blame the companies and there investors. Companies would do anything to make a quick dollar. If it means laying off there entire manufacturing employees to save a few dollars in manufacturing, they would do it. If it means laying off an entire town who was employed at that factory to save a few dollars, they would do it. If it means exploiting a Chinese worker by not even paying 10% of what was paid to a domestic employee, and must work twice as long in unsafe conditions to save a few dollars, they would do it. We always hear of the shit conditions chinese workers has to deal with everyday. Look at Foxconn! Foxconn makes all your iPhones, Nokia’s and many popular electronics.
But then there is the investors. Investors as much to blame as everyone els. They become more aggressive pressuring the company to increase profits. Instead of getting the company to earn fair and steady profits through out the year, they pretty much hold the company hostage by getting them to cut as much corners as possible to increase profits. That’s when you got no choice but to close your domestic factories and move them to china where it is much cheaper to produce. All in an effort to please your investors.
Last but finally, I blame the unions of these factory workers. Now I am a supporter of unions. I really think they played a very important roll in getting worker’s rights laws implemented and passed into law. They have helped make the work place safer and have help make sure that financial aid and support would be provided to an employee if he or she was injured on the job. But Where I have a problem is when unions started to get greedy. When unions go on strike for unreasonable work hours, increased wages or pension plans, Tha’ts when my support starts to reach it’s limits. When you go on strike for a 25% increase in your wage every four years, you will just piss off management and they then give up on the unions and consider moving the manufacturing to China. And that’s what exactly happens many times. Sometimes Unions go on strike to the point where management just decides to close the factory all together and layoff all the employees. Maybe if they where not so greedy, they would still have all there jobs.
So then again, I feel it’s everyone’s fault. It has gotten to the point where I no longer have the choice to buy something here that was domestically made or something that was made in China. There all made in China now. But I want that choice! I would rather spend more on something that was made here than something made in China. Buying something here means someone will be able to keep there job and go home to feed there family tonight! Sure it may cost more, but thats the price to pay if people want to have there jobs back.
But thats the thing. Everyone is complaining how much the economy is shit these days. Everyone is complaining how there is no jobs anymore. Everyone is going to the government asking why is the economy is shit and what to do to make it better. I think the answer to both is simple. All those people who are complaining to the government should go back to there homes and look around there houses. They should look around and pick up whatever they see. Find where it was made in. Most likely you will find that it was made in China. You see? that’s where all your jobs went! That’s why there is no jobs left!
People really need to get a mind set of not buying stuff cheap from China and demand companies bring back jobs. People also need to to have a mind set that if they want there jobs back, they need to understand that things may cost more. But you know what? If people bought stuff domestically while affording all of it and lived quite happily back in the 50′s to the 80s, how would it be any different from the 2010′s onwards?
We really should tell China to fuck off and give them the finger by moving all are jobs back here. I find the way Chinese employees have been exploited all these years by us to be unacceptable and I find it discussing that I’m forced as a consumer to buy Chinese goods. While moving jobs back hear might not solve all the problems we have here in North America, it would at least provide jobs and job creation is something I find most important to deal with this bullshit economic situation.
On my next post, I will be talking about the other bullshits we all got to deal with. Increasing debt, increasingly unaffordable housing, increasingly unaffordable energy costs and an increasingly ageing population. Do check back for when that gets posted!
