This
image was taken from a real label that was found on the streets of New York.
The
economic value of China's annual exports to the United States is estimated to
be $417 billion, and growing each year. The number of American jobs lost to
Chinese imports each year is likely in the hundreds of thousands. This data may
help to explain why the Obama administration has struggled with a nagging
unemployment rate of approximately 8%, even as the stock market reaches record highs.
It is no
surprise to the consumer that very little furniture, electronics, toys or
apparel are manufactured in the U.S. any longer, as these items are increasingly imported from China and other developing nations.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the
negative impact of cheap Chinese imports on the American economy is far greater
than previously thought.
Similarly,
a Wall Street Journal report in April 2012 found that America’s largest
multinational corporations outsourced more than 2.4 million jobs over
the last decade, even as they cut their overall workforces by 2.9 million.
Outsourcing
jobs to a cheaper foreign labor pool, and increasing the number of cheaply made
products from China makes perfectly sound business sense at the microcosmic
level in the short-term. Indeed, Wal-Mart has generated billions of dollars in profits
derived virtually entirely from this very business model.
However, as
a long-term matter, this strategy has the potential to tarnish brands, lower
quality, encourage counterfeiting, and even destroy entire industries.
For
example, in Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, author Dana Thomas
chronicles how some luxury brands have resorted to cheap, Chinese mass-market
production methods, and how doing so has risked their previously sterling
reputations.
No
industry is immune from the effects of globalization, cheap imports and job
outsourcing. Ironically, even U.S. patent lawyers have seen previously high-paying
jobs outsourced overseas.
