It is a matter of supply and demand.
Here in that capitalist utopia that is America, we celebrate shareholder profits over human life. Because of our shareholder primacy model, the greatest consumer market in human history, us, is a really, really expensive place to live. We get nickel and dimed to death, and the middle class is nearly extinct. Most Americans are a paycheck away from not being able to pay the bills, and the average American cannot deal with a $400 unplanned expenditure.
Because of this, we demand cheap, high quality goods, which has made a permanent low-paid, no benefits, no predictable hours workforce a necessity. But these darned Democrats keep raising the minimum wage!
Now, as businesses are facing chronic labor shortages because people are no longer willing to work really hard in bad conditions, with unpredictable hours, low pay and no benefits, they are accelerating capital expenditures to keep productivity high with fewer people on the payroll.
What this means is that American corporations, and small businesses, routinely outsource business functions overseas where wages are much cheaper. This way, they can continue keeping labor costs down while profits stay high. Right now, 'Murika outsources around 300,000 jobs a year, and while this has created jobs overseas, wages are so low in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central/South America, that many of the workers cannot afford the goods they produce, or the services they support.
The real issue here, though, is automation and artificial intelligence. It has been automation that has allowed many of these jobs to be offshored. Oh, we hear about factories packing up, and moving the whole shebang to Mexico or the like, and NAFTA did cost us around 800,000 jobs by some estimates. But it is automation and artificial intelligence that allows the outsourcing of jobs like software development, customer support, digital marketing, accounting and other business support functions.
As workers lose livelihoods to automation, there will be fewer jobs - if a company spends capital to automate operations and lays off ten people as a result, they will only need perhaps 2 or 3 workers to manage the automated operation. We see this with today's modern cotton farming, which is now a one person operation using high-tech agri methods instead of human labor.
It is these workers who BUY THE STUFF that generates the profits for shareholders!
See the problem? It is ultimately a house of cards. If corporations are able to automate fully so most of the workers are no longer necessary, how will demand for goods and services remain high enough to keep the companies afloat?
It is at this point that, over massive, massive resistance from conservatives and so-called 'moderates', we will have to rethink how we organize and operate our economy. Capitalism is a house of cards that holds the seeds of its own destruction because unlimited growth is a philosophy more akin to cancer cells that healthy human culture.
We could, actually write a book about this, because ultimately what will have to 'go' is stratospheric profits, and big multinationals like the 55 major corporations that did not pay any federal income tax last year, can afford this, but small businesses not so much, and certainly not franchises.
But it is breaking down. You can see it. The consumer supply chain is not 'healing' like the experts said it would. The anti-vaxxers have seen to that. Did you know there are sailors in merchant marines who HAVE NOT BEEN ASHORE AT ALL IN TWO YEARS? In Chicago, they have severe truck driver shortages and cannot find barge pilots to carry cargo downriver. For the barges, they are offering thousands of dollars as sign-on bonuses, and a forty-day-on, forty-day-off schedule, and they cannot find enough people who want to do that. Same with OTR trucking.
Instead 9 in 10 global workers now, after being home for months during the pandemic, have discovered a) they don't really need as much consumer stuff, b) they now insist on better wages, and better benefits, such as healthcare and defined benefit pensions, and c) they would like more say in when and where they work.
We are literally watching the death-throes of late stage capitalism and the birth of another, hopefully more humane system, my friend. Call me a utopian - God knows many people have - but what would it be like if we reorganized our society around human need, and created a system where everyone had enough. Think of it! Gone would be the days when 25,000 people a day starve to death on this planet. Gone would be wage slavery and debt slavery. Gone would be...well, you can fill in the blank.
Maybe time for us to grow up and begin thinking and planning as a species.
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