» HADOUKEN « the jobs are gone and they're never coming back
Over the course of the last 36 or so hours, I've seen innumerable posts, tweets and comments attempting to predict how "fucked" America is. As a hyper moderate and at times politically apathetic moderate who voted democrat in this year's election, I too feel a bit uneasy about America's future. Sure, it's very, very easy to point to Supreme Leader (elect) Trump's disgusting comments against women, religious and racial minorities, news organizations--you name it--to make a slam dunk case against his overall fitness to serve in office, but a good 48% of the country has been doing that for about a year now to no avail. It's a bit more difficult, and in complete honesty, a lot scarier, to point to the radicalization of hyper educated, alt-right while males on the Internet to give context to the bubbling ethnocentrism in suburban America. And perhaps even more difficult is to come to a complete understanding of the white sociological underclass so disaffected by Washington that they could stare the wolf dead in the face and say "he tells it like it is."
It was not my intention to "get all political" (it rarely is), so if you expected to read something fashion-related this morning, allow me to pivot. While it has been maddeningly difficult to pin Drumpf down on any concrete issue this election cycle, he has made vague, general promises to "make shit better" by repealing or otherwise "getting rid of" (not quite sure this man has ever read the constitution--actually, I'm pretty sure he has never read the constitution) all sorts of legislation, trade deals, regulations and so on. One of those promises was to renegotiate long standing free trade agreements with continental and trans-Atlantic/Pacific partners. For one second, let's assume President Tannen is able to do such a thing. On top of that, let's assume he even puts in place a harsh 40% tariff on manufacturing imports. Taking those facts into consideration, we come to my point: the jobs are gone, they are never coming back, the world is an entirely different place than it was in 1994 (when minimum wage was an inhumane $4.25/hour) and globalization is a lot more difficult to navigate when a super power tries to stick its chest out and flaunt isolationist policies that are no longer fruitful in today's connected world.
Have you ever made something? Let's say, a shirt? No? Well, it's a really interesting process--one that is governed by keeping your costs as low as you can in order to skim as much profit as possible in the margin that is left between your finished product and the price at which it retails. You know why < 1% of all of the world's shirts are made in America? No, it's not because they took our jobs! It's because we gave them our jobs. We gave them our jobs when it became no longer sensical to make a shirt in America, when the rest of the world figured out how to make a shirt, then how to make a shirt better than we do here in America and at a cost that is multiple times lower than the cost to manufacture within our own borders. With minimum wage poised to soar above $15/hour in pretty much every state in our union, do you really believe that we can cost-effectively make shirts in America? Before you even get into the cost of raw goods, working off a standard 80% retail mark up, that shirt costs $75 by the time it reaches the customer. By adding in a few of the left out variables (fabric, trim etc.), you can see that American factories are left manufacturing at a luxury price point. And I have news for you 1. there isn't enough luxury product to sustain the recreation of an entire industry within our country and 2. having closed 99% of our factories over the last 20 years while the rest of the world invested in new technologies and educated their workforce, not only have we lost the human capital and knowhow, the rest of the world has left us in the dust when it comes to making product--they simply do it better than we do.
And let's be really real: you think two generations of Pokemon Go playing, reality TV watching, meme making, Candy Crush obsessing entitled children are ready to flock back to the factories, coal mines and assembly lines? You think they are hungry enough to fight for their future? Not only do we have no one to pass down the skills and knowledge, they simply rather be doing something else--anything else--at this point. And who's to blame them? We brought this upon ourselves.
So, the jobs are gone, and they're never coming back. We have a sociopath in line to become the next president of the United States and a disaffected, fractured population looking for change (on both sides). I don't know where we go from here, but I can state with confidence that the only way is forward. I guess it's just up to each individual to make what's left of the system work for him or herself in whatever way he or she can.