Issue Position: Jobs

Issue Position

I don't know exactly when it happened, but the US does not seem to make much of anything anymore. We have HUGE corporations that make trillions of dollar$ - like Nike, Apple, Levis who sell great products like shoes, iPads and pants. However, there are no Nike shoes made in the US - there are no iPhones made in the US - there are no 501s made in the US...

With few exceptions like American Apparel, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, high-end Gibson guitars..., most of the products we buy at Wal-Mart are made in China, India or other developing countries. How did this happen? The short answer is it's cheaper to build your products where hourly wages are extremely low, and there are little to no incentives or regulations that keep companies from doing so.

I think that it's wrong to exploit other people and their environments to make our products cheaper, and I have a simple approach that would make this exploitation go away. Today - when a company wants to make products in the U.S. - they have to follow certain rules (OSHA regulations, Minimum Wage, Environmental regulations...). Why are we OK with throwing all of these basic standards out the window when we ship jobs overseas? So the simple approach is this: Apply the above rules to any company who wants to SELL products in the U.S. This way, no matter where the products are made, there would still need to be our OSHA regulations, our Minimum Wage and our Environment regulations. This would make it cheaper to make products here, because there is no advantage to sending jobs overseas, and the cost of shipping items from China to the U.S. would add to the cost of production / Logistics.

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