The offshoring of conscience

by David Benjamin

“We are going to have a long-term worker shortage. So, bringing back high-labor content products doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

— Sen. Ron Johnson

 

MADISON, Wis. — One of the capitalists myths punctured by the Covid-19 pandemic was the efficiency of the global supply chain, which allowed corporations to offshore manufacturing jobs—and many service jobs—to cheap-labor or slave-labor “Third World” countries. When international shipping services broke down, parts, materials and finished goods were stranded, creating shortages that ranged from everything to steel and rare earths to used cars and baby formula. 

In an essay I wrote a while ago, I noted that this sort of breakdown, rooted in dependence on importing raw materials from cheap, but faraway places, has affected world and regional economies before.

The Civil War, for example, crippled Great Britain’s textile industry, cutting off its supply of dirt-cheap raw cotton from the suddenly blockaded Confederate States. The genesis of this offshore crisis was Britain’s seemingly virtuous gesture of banning its slave trade in 1833. The British could afford to shutter the slave market in Liverpool because there were a million-odd slaves in America, producing cotton for free. All those slave ships—and the accompanying messiness—could be refitted as cotton barges. In a canny stroke of 19th-century supply-chain management, by importing cutrate cotton picked and ginned by African slaves in the American south, Britain foreshadowed America’s “offshoring” of manufacturing jobs in the 20th century.

Meanwhile, back in England, British textile workers were faring barely better than the slaves of Mississippi. Badgered and beaten by overseers, they slogged through shifts of twelve hours or more, after which they stumbled home sick and exhausted, with barely enough wages to buy a potato. Many of the workers were children.

Slavery by any other name…

When I wrote about this, comparing the British sweatshops of yore with American and multinational companies who offshore the making of their products to near-slave labor in Xinjiang, Indonesia, Malaysia and other out-of-sight, out-of-mind outposts of capitalism, a reader named Jacob replied that I had the issue upside-down. “When you outsource a work the labor say in Asian countries still get higher or comparatively good wages as per the base country they work in,” Jacob wrote. “These wages are definitely much less when compared to Western countries, so there is absolutely nothing wrong. Its win-win for one who is outsourcing and one who is getting the work.”

Although I’m sure it was unintentional, Jacob’s marginally grammatical statement evokes the classic Marxist view that whoever controls the means of production gets to call the economic shots. It also suggested to me that Jacob has never done the sort of menial, manual drudgery that he characterizes as a “win” for the folks saddled to those mind-numbing, spirit-crushing jobs for eight, twelve, sixteen hours every day, six or seven days a week.

(The longest shift I ever worked at the Waunakee Canning Company was about 27 hours straight—at $1.30 an hour. So I know the drill. But that was a summer job and my “overtime” was voluntary.)

Lately, of course, we’ve observed a push by liberal politicians to repatriate as many manufacturing jobs as possible. This is happening despite an unemployment rate that has fallen to record lows and prompted some conservatives to say, “Wait a minute.” At a candidate forum in June, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson suggested that we should leave all those outsourced jobs offshore, because nobody needs ‘em in America anymore. 

He did not suggest, however, that a minimum-wage ($7.25 an hour) potwasher at McDonald’s in Louisville might be willing to upgrade his status to assembling semiconductors ($24 an hour?) for TSMC in Arizona. Or the warehouse janitor making eight bucks an hour might prefer earning three times as much at a wind-turbine factory. 

As often happens, the dilemma posed by Jacob reminds me of a movie. In Midnight Run, Robert DeNiro is a disgraced police detective named Jack. He’s employed by a sleazy bail bondsman—played frantically by the underappreciated Joe Pantoliano—to chase down petty crooks. Jack hates his job, but it’s the only one he can get. The “midnight run” he agrees to undertake is dangerous. He must bring a mob accountant, Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas (Charles Grodin), to court to testify against his vengeful former employers. Both Jack and the Duke, traveling from New York to L.A., become targets of a team of professional hitmen. If Jack succeeds, his $100,000 payday will free him to kiss his rotten job goodbye. He will earn what Burt Reynolds, in another movie, called “screw-you money.”

(Well, he actually used a different verb. But I’m being decorous.)

At its heart, Jack’s midnight run is a parable about freedom, especially in a nation that has erected as its economic pillars the I’ve-got-mine capitalism of Milton Friedman and the trickle-down magical thinking of Arthur Laffer. In a theologically pure capitalist state—modeled after the “win win” oversimplifications of my critic Jacob—liberty becomes not a right endowed by our Creator or Founding Fathers. Nor is freedom necessarily earned through hard work, punctuality, dependability, honesty and loyalty.

You buy it. 

The hitch is the price. You can’t buy freedom in a minimum-wage job, or as a skip tracer for a bail bondsman. Or on an assembly line in Shenzhen. What you have to do, as Jack exemplifies, is to find a way—any way, ethical or otherwise—to make a bundle so big that you can flip your finger at the foreman and walk away, still alive, from your dead-end and potentially deadly job at Triangle Shirtwaist, or Tazreen Fashions, or Globaltech.

At Tazreen or Foxconn, your $2 or $3 a day—or your $20 a week—isn’t enough to turn the corner, buy your ticket out of the rat race and live your dream. It’s not even enough to move out of the company dorm and buy a used car to sleep in. Somebody is “winning” in these offshore labor markets but it’s not the laborer. 

There is stuff you can buy, in any county, on a wage of $2 a day, even $10-$20 a day. There is stuff a jobless American can buy with his unemployment check. But none of this stuff is freedom. 

Nor is it victory. 

Ironically, in Midnight Run, Jack wins his freedom by forsaking his lifelong work ethic. He quits his job, blows off Joe Pantoliano and sets his prisoner free. In return, the Duke bestows on Jack some of the screw-you money—derived from drugs, prostitution and extortion—that he stole from the Mob. 

The moral of the film is that if you’re a normal working slob, you can never afford to buy your freedom, unless you get ridiculously lucky. 

Also, crime pays.

When you think about it, that’s also the moral of capitalism as it applies, currently, to honest labor. As long as seemingly conscientious people like my critic Jacob profess that all stakeholders are benefiting equally from a fundamentally feudal economic model that places the lowest possible value on its highest-value component—the toil of earnest, honest human beings—the thieves in the story will walk away from whatever havoc they wreak, scot-free and filthy rich.