There is lots of cultural adjustment on both sides. However Chinese bosses have to know that there are some things which cannot adjust to their expectations like labor laws as well as what they express as work ethic.
It's good for the local economies that the larger companies (GM, etc) create the effect where foreign investors see opportunity in these feeder companies as labor costs back home begin to rise making these investments attractive.
It speaks to their commitment to making their investment work that they are only 15% behind in productivity given the "handicaps" of different work ethic, skills, pay and regulation.
> There is lots of cultural adjustment on both sides. However Chinese bosses have to know that there are some things which cannot adjust to their expectations like labor laws as well as what they express as work ethic.
I don't believe this assumption is correct. There are plenty of cases where US bosses are fully capable of adjusting to inexistent labor laws and abusive labor practices.
If US bosses are quite capable of adjusting to other jurisdictions, why do you assume that Chinese bosses aren't?
Or just human resource: we are just property of our employers.
I'll say this again for any employer who thinks they care about their employees: please make all salary and benefits information for everyone public. Until you do so, you may not criticize Travis (of Uber) or anyone else when it comes to treating employees well. Put your money where your mouth is!
Who's to say that our employees want their salary information made public?
Why would I need to work at a company where all salary is transparent in order to have an opinion on whether Walmart/Amazon treat their employees fairly, whether there should be no, a lower, or a higher minimum wage, or whether Uber's culture is one that should be celebrated and modeled or reviled?
The point is you and I don't have a say either way. Jim, congrats on being a VP but you and I are just pawns. We have no leverage.
If you don't believe me, try bringing this up in a board meeting and see how far it flies. Employers benefit tremendously from the I formation assymetry which to me is a much bigger crime than some idiots who can't keep their junk in their pants.
I'm just an idiot on the Internet and you've actually made it. I'd like to apologize if this sounds condescending because it is absolutely not (in part because I'm so far below you that it is physically impossible but regardless of my fortune it is not meant to be). Mind you, i have no original thoughts and this is something i stole from buffer. I think buffer is a great example on how to do things. I wish all the sjw's in silicon valley would direct their attention to something that actually benefits the world for a change.
It is because companies behave like communist states and are allowed to have dictators, most of the times with power over life and death issues of their citizens/employees.
Fight dictatorial control with dictatorial control.
Or maybe try moving away from corporations and towards cooperatives.
Problem is, making coops popular requires ambition and dedication from the workers, because there will no capitalist looking to make a profit to jumpstart the business.
>Fight dictatorial control with dictatorial control.
...You do know that communism advocates for a society where control is something done in collaboration with others? Because China, or the USSR calls itself communist does not mean it is. A simple reading of Marx & Engels' work would clarify that.
Everything eventually degrades into a dictatorship.
Thus we invented advanced concepts to avoid this- like - everyone holds there breath- taxes to milk corroding power accumulating back into the system as a whole - and parliament democracy, which basically consists out of a bonemill for wanna-be dictators, grinding one another to dust in a weapon less fight for power.
The boss has the power to give orders. The worker obeys or the worker gets fired. There are limits to what orders the boss can give, but it almost certainly includes things the worker would rather not do. Pretending it's a collaboration of equals only increases exploitation of workers, because it helps bosses pressure them into doing things they have no legal obligation to do by framing it as a favor for a friend.
Further, there are many cases where the 'collaboration of equals' model is fundamentally incompatible with the organization being able to function.
One example: regulatory compliance and internal audit departments (and by extension, employees working within those groups) generally trump nearly every other department in terms of dictating processes and procedures, because ensuring that the company isn't sanctioned/fined into oblivion by regulators is an imperative for continued operation of the company. This is a necessary power structure because employees specializing in product delivery or other internal operations don't have the domain knowledge to effectively self-regulate to compliance standards, nor understand the legal and fiscal implications of non-compliance.
Your examples, compliance and audit, can be powerful in helping distill risk management issues and communicate them; however, also consider that, in high risk environments that doesn't make it incompatible with other forms of collaboration on risk.
Consider safety on oil rigs. There, collaboration on safety is a focal point of all-hands meetings every 12 hours.
Both top-down and bottom-up management can be effective, and a combination can be even more so.
Like it or not, obedience, to a supervisor and/or ultimately corporate policy, is absolutely necessary to maintain stable and consistent operations at scale.
Further, there are plenty of situations, especially involving so-called "blue collar" labor, where the collaborative approach of "working with" others in a relatively flat org structure just isn't tenable, especially where definition of the product design and QA processes require high levels of technical expertise and specialization.
To be fair, it's a loanword from Dutch's baas, which is 'master'. It's just been part of the English lexicon for so long that the original connotation has largely been lost for most English speakers.
Fair enough, but "master" also has no negative connotations for me. It roughly means "in charge of." The postmaster is in charge of running the post office. The ship's master is in charge of the day to day running of the ship (though he takes his orders from the commander). And so on.
I thought the aside about NUMMI was interesting [1]. Though the difference between Dayton culture and Chinese culture might be bigger than the difference between Fremont culture and Japanese culture, it's been done successfully before.
Having lived in both Dayton and the bay area for many years, the cultural differences in those places are fewer than many in either place would likely assume. This is probably especially true of those most likely to work in production at one of these two plants.
The differences between any two Americans are going to be much smaller than the differences between two Chinese people from different regions of China, or two Indians from different regions of India. We often take for granted that Native born Americans are drastically more united culturally than people living in more conflict ridden parts of the world.
I think you must have a pretty narrow view of "Americans" if you believe that. Do you think a Shanghaier and a Beijiger have less in common than an Ethiopian refugee in Virginia does with a Hmong in Missouri?
It's not necessary to compare immigrants. You could pick a white guy from rural Appalachia and a white guy from downtown New York and they would be unlikely to have anything in common except that they are both Americans.
If this is a criticism (not sure what it is actually), is it really fair to criticize any nation for the diversity of its immigrants?
Urban Missouri and urban Virginia are essentially identical culturally, and the rural areas of each state are very similar. I haven't been an immigrant from abroad in either state, but I'd expect the experiences of those once arrived in USA to be fairly similar as well.
Similar in some ways, different in many others. In either case, it's really not accurate to write off the level of diversity in the USA. TV and media give you a very skewed and artificial idea of uniformity in America.
"Globalization helped bolster economies around the world, including China’s, and is now allowing a class of wealthy people and companies from those economies to invest in the United States, creating jobs in depressed regions like Ohio."
So instead of Americans owning American companies, and employing 100% American labor, most of the factories have shut down, and the ones that are left are owned and operated by the Chinese and employ a large fraction of foreign workers, although not a majority. How on Earth is this better? The globalists at The Atlantic have clearly outdone themselves with this backwards logic.
It is fair by the laws of Capitalism. China is roughly 3x the US population. If everything is distributed "fairly" by the invisible hand, they should end up with a larger piece of the economic pie. Whether we as Americans want that or should want that is another issue.
Which is why I'm using the invisible hand definition of "fair". The principle of the invisible hand, a cornerstone of modern capitalism, is that when everyone does what is in their own best interest things are distributed most fairly. Not saying I agree with it, but that's the moral theory.
The factory jobs were doomed anyway. Look at American steel production. We produce 80% of the steel we used to, but only employ 20% of the workers. And in a few years it will probably be a lot less than that because of improving automation technology. Does it really matter if it was a Chinese or a robot that took your job?
Economically it's superior. If a robot, or a Chinese factory, can produce goods cheaper, why not take advantage of it? Cheaper goods benefit everyone. The pie isn't finite. A more efficient economy means a bigger pie, not fewer slices.
Better for who - better for Americans? Or better for the world?
This is the free market in action. It has dictated people want chinese goods more at their price point than american goods at theirs.
The overall quality of life worldwide has gone up. 96% of the world's population - 7.2 billion people are not American.
If you are a human being you should be happy humanity is better rather than selfishly worrying about the 4% of the world whose lives improved less than the rest.
This is all well and good if you live in a wealthy family in the US. However, the global economy means nothing to me if my entire family is seeing a declining quality of life, I have to wait for years and go tens of thousands of dollars in debt to find a good job, and I live in fear of getting sick because I don't know how I'll afford it. That's why my priorities are for my family first, country second, and global "community" last.
If globalization is needed so badly to lift the world, we need to find a way to change it in a way that doesn't destabilize us in the process.
It is related to the declining quality of life Americans are experiencing. If the economy was still incredibly unequal but quality of life was still going up, there wouldn't be nearly as much disdain for the rich as there is right now.
From the article, it didn't sound like the Chinese are exactly generous with sick time. Admittedly it wasn't directly addressed other than by the general "Chinese workers work more hours" observation.
I meant my country as a group of people, not our government. I don't care about my government, it has failed me, but my country is full of everyday people just trying to get by. Because we are of a same or similar culture, and because we live in closer proximity, it's only natural that I care about them more than people of other countries.
Americans are solidly opposed to the Republican party's agenda to gut health care. [0] Blaming Americans for their health care problems is like blaming Russians for Putin's largesse. It's just generally much harder for the masses to hold the few accountable than for the few to keep the masses in check.
This problem has existed long before the most recent iteration of healthcare "reform". People (real Americans!) have consistently voted in the representatives who are trying to undo a medical system that covers everyone because they are so enamored with the free market ideal and hate the idea of contributing to their country in the form of taxes.
This is quite the catch-22. Domestic wealth inequality within the US has widened. Global wealth inequality has narrowed (dramatically). These two trends are very connected.
> my family first, country second, and global "community" last.
Well, in many cases (but not all of course), people who put "country" first, get much better outcomes in the end. In fact, if you look at the poor half of the world -- it's where everybody mostly put themselves first.
So I argue that for the best life quality, there should be
some balance between the two. Although figuring out the best balance is a very hard problem.
>If you are a human being you should be happy humanity is better rather than selfishly worrying about the 4% of the world whose lives improved less than the rest.
this is easy to say until it's your family's livelihood.
If you are a human being you should be happy humanity is better rather than selfishly worrying about the 4% of the world whose lives improved less than the rest.
Have you seen the elephant graph? [0] The reason people are upset is not because they are selfish, it's because the people above them are. The wealthiest of the wealthy 0.1% have profited immensely, the lower half of the world's population has been lifted out of poverty, and this has all come at the expense of the American blue collar worker. Factories have closed, the opioid epidemic has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and everybody is calling these suffering people selfish and lazy. It's no wonder they want to give everyone the middle finger and vote for Trump.
> The wealthiest of the wealthy 0.1% have profited immensely, the lower half of the world's population has been lifted out of poverty, and this has all come at the expense of the American blue collar worker.
Correlation doesn't mean causation. The blue collar workers of America have lost purchasing power. That is a fact. Chinese factory workers are better off, that's another one. But blue collar workers from other countries are better off than their American counterparts. How's that possible?
Health care, education, name it and you will see that don't work anymore. War again drugs, a complete disaster. But that's because the 0.1% stopped paying their fair amount of taxes and have converted the public services into their own private business in name of a "small government" while these same rules don't apply to them because they are "too big to fail". And has nothing, or little, to do with Chinese factory workers. Americans have voted for their own government to not help them anymore. It is not just poor people that suffer that lack of services but all the general population, except for the 0.1% that has money to pay for it all.
America have grown a lot in this past years, redistribution of wealth has failed. The 0.1% talks about not wanting a "class warfare" while fighting one.
Everything is linked in the economy. When I say that it's come at the expense of these workers, I don't mean somebody made the call to take money from them and give it to Chinese workers. I mean that in the grand game of musical chairs, they are the ones who have been left standing.
Trump, a billionaire who continues to make the wealthy wealthier and fuck over the poor. Anyone would've been a better choice, but hey, American propaganda is amazing (I'm serious, it's amazing, I'm glad most European countries don't have the same know how or have an extremely skeptical population).
Well, the problem with the US political system is that everybody focuses on the presidential election and Congress ends up deeply entrenched due to extreme polarization and gerrymandering.
Lack of diversity (two parties), extremely long campaign cycles with unlimited funding/advertising, and a large amount of uneducated populace are additional contributors (among a whole lot more).
If you have a welfare state then you need borders and immigration control to keep people from exploiting it.
If your government relies on labour inefficiency for revenue (as a welfare state does) then globalization will impoverish your government, driving up tax rates; and since this is unsustainable, you must inevitably protect national labour.
Notice that the countries with the largest welfare states in the world (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway) fare better by far in global indexes of happiness, human development, freedom, democracy, etc.
By welfare state you mean states with extreme income inequality? Because Europe does pretty well on welfare, because it taxes the rich more. And it has protectionism too, which helps.
This is a really good point. It's the only argument I've heard against a strong social safety net that makes sense, and I really don't know a good counter. If you have government-provided health care, government-provided university, etc. then you are very likely to _have_ to restrict immigration since there will be people from places that do not offer those things who wish to avail of it. After all, you'd be foolish not to. If every sick American without health insurance could just pop over to Canada to get treated for free it would bankrupt Canada.
I am a supporter of single payer health care and vastly reduced tuition (or the elimination of the university's role in modern society, but that's another conversation), but I also like the idea of freedom to travel and open borders, and I've never found a way to square the two. I used to burn with envy when I read that such and such writer or artist moved to Paris from the US like it was no problem at all - how was it possible 100 years ago but not now? France offered fewer protections then, and had less to lose from letting people in.
> I am a supporter of single payer health care and vastly reduced tuition (or the elimination of the university's role in modern society, but that's another conversation), but I also like the idea of freedom to travel and open borders, and I've never found a way to square the two.
This is deeply misguided. I strongly encourage you to look at the evidence about the impact of immigrants on government's fiscal positions. In both the Germany and the US there is strong evidence that immigrants contribute far more in taxes than the benefits they receive. It's possible to have a discussion about the economic impact on immigration but it requires examination of facts, not cockamie speculation that the government "loses" on every immigrant.
I think it's only a good argument if, when you weigh your ability to travel like a 18th century writer and the ability of the poorest in society to avoid destitution, you find that they come out close. The best argument in favor of welfare continues to be the Rawlsian veil of ignorance and I'm pretty sure that behind that veil I would pick welfare programs over free travel.
I live in Canada, and here's how my last couple months with the healthcare system has gone (anecdote and first world problem alert):
About two months ago, it was the beginning of a weekend and there were no clinics open that would see me until the coming Monday. Something was rapidly deteriorating the skin on my hands. So I called an advice line, and the nurse on the line said that I should go to an emergency department.
So I went to an emergency department, waited a few hours and was then seen by a doctor who could not diagnose me. She gave me a prescription for a week course of antibiotics and a topical cream, and said that a dermatology office would call me over the next week. I filled the prescription on my (thankfully exceptionally good) employer drug coverage. I followed the prescription regimen for the week and did not hear from the dermatology office, thankfully the cream was enough to apply according to the directions for up to a month and was seemingly keeping the deterioration of my hands at bay. I waited another two weeks for the dermatologist to call, and they did not. I called the hospital and was connected to a representative which did not speak or understand English very well and ended up being connected to the wrong department; then I called the hospital again and the lady at the hospital connected me with the dermatology office which was to receive my referral. After about 25 minutes I was able to deduce that the ER had not yet faxed the referral to the dermatology office, so I called the ER and thankfully still had my discharge form on hand to reference and help them track down the referral. I made sure they faxed the referral, and confirmed with the dermatology office which told me that I would be scheduled for about Tuesday last week (and would receive a call when it was confirmed). I still haven't heard from the dermatologists and I'll probably have to nag them again. I'm currently attempting to treat the condition by myself by reading random articles and blogs, and medical research on Baidu Wenku (thank god for high IQ) and doing okay, though it's not eliminated.
For critical/emergency care, Canada's system often works quite well (though sometimes fails horribly). If you have anything less than an emergency, or need dental work or drugs, you need your own insurance. That said, the fields which are still private in Canada (lasik, dental, optical) are reasonable to pay for by yourself if you're middle class. The fields which are covered by government insurance are illegal to pay for by yourself.
>Americans[1] owning American[2] companies, and employing 100% American[3] labor
Americans[1] is not the same as Americans[3], there is some overlap (in the sense that Americans can own shares in US companies) but Americans[1] are mostly aristocrats, and whether those aristocrats live in New York or Shanghai shouldn't matter much to Americans[3].
Besides that, "most of the factories have shut down" is false, American manufacturing hasn't shrunk, it just employs less people and more capital. Most Americans ([1] and [3]) work in the service sector now. This is a change that is orthogonal to the nationality of factory owners, and is coming to China soon enough.
An article that is simultaneously interesting and unsurprising. Cultural differences can be hard to navigate in the workplace, especially if you can't communicate without Google Translate.
The learning and adjustment curve will be difficult, but I hope both parties can navigate it well and prosper.
Americans, for the most part desire sinecures. In fact they believe sinecures are a human right.
This is because the US has been able to provide these types of jobs for the majority of the population for many generations. What is a sinecure from the global perspective is normal from the US perspective.
Being able to consistently trade time for money is the core sinecure belief, the lack of risk is key. This is only possible in highly controlled almost game like situations. The "real world" requires proof of value and often a lot of risk.
A pet theory if mine is that many American companies use off shoring to continue to provide sinecure benefits for their important workers while lowering costs. Those workers don't see it as such as they already have sinecures in this model. The offshoring is necessary for company survival.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadIt's good for the local economies that the larger companies (GM, etc) create the effect where foreign investors see opportunity in these feeder companies as labor costs back home begin to rise making these investments attractive.
It speaks to their commitment to making their investment work that they are only 15% behind in productivity given the "handicaps" of different work ethic, skills, pay and regulation.
I don't believe this assumption is correct. There are plenty of cases where US bosses are fully capable of adjusting to inexistent labor laws and abusive labor practices.
If US bosses are quite capable of adjusting to other jurisdictions, why do you assume that Chinese bosses aren't?
Similarly "work for" should be changed to "work with".
Words matter. Why do we actively choose to use poor ones?
See the use of "poaching" to describe companies hiring employees of other companies for a prominent example in the tech community.
I'll say this again for any employer who thinks they care about their employees: please make all salary and benefits information for everyone public. Until you do so, you may not criticize Travis (of Uber) or anyone else when it comes to treating employees well. Put your money where your mouth is!
Why would I need to work at a company where all salary is transparent in order to have an opinion on whether Walmart/Amazon treat their employees fairly, whether there should be no, a lower, or a higher minimum wage, or whether Uber's culture is one that should be celebrated and modeled or reviled?
If you don't believe me, try bringing this up in a board meeting and see how far it flies. Employers benefit tremendously from the I formation assymetry which to me is a much bigger crime than some idiots who can't keep their junk in their pants.
I'm just an idiot on the Internet and you've actually made it. I'd like to apologize if this sounds condescending because it is absolutely not (in part because I'm so far below you that it is physically impossible but regardless of my fortune it is not meant to be). Mind you, i have no original thoughts and this is something i stole from buffer. I think buffer is a great example on how to do things. I wish all the sjw's in silicon valley would direct their attention to something that actually benefits the world for a change.
https://open.buffer.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-...
I encourage you to keep an open mind about this.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely yours,
Or maybe try moving away from corporations and towards cooperatives.
Problem is, making coops popular requires ambition and dedication from the workers, because there will no capitalist looking to make a profit to jumpstart the business.
...You do know that communism advocates for a society where control is something done in collaboration with others? Because China, or the USSR calls itself communist does not mean it is. A simple reading of Marx & Engels' work would clarify that.
Thus we invented advanced concepts to avoid this- like - everyone holds there breath- taxes to milk corroding power accumulating back into the system as a whole - and parliament democracy, which basically consists out of a bonemill for wanna-be dictators, grinding one another to dust in a weapon less fight for power.
One example: regulatory compliance and internal audit departments (and by extension, employees working within those groups) generally trump nearly every other department in terms of dictating processes and procedures, because ensuring that the company isn't sanctioned/fined into oblivion by regulators is an imperative for continued operation of the company. This is a necessary power structure because employees specializing in product delivery or other internal operations don't have the domain knowledge to effectively self-regulate to compliance standards, nor understand the legal and fiscal implications of non-compliance.
Consider safety on oil rigs. There, collaboration on safety is a focal point of all-hands meetings every 12 hours.
Both top-down and bottom-up management can be effective, and a combination can be even more so.
Further, there are plenty of situations, especially involving so-called "blue collar" labor, where the collaborative approach of "working with" others in a relatively flat org structure just isn't tenable, especially where definition of the product design and QA processes require high levels of technical expertise and specialization.
It would work if everyone was equally educated and motivated, but for most human purposes, a hierarchical command structure always works better.
The most important part is the ones with power giving more attention and care to the ones without - so everyone can be happy with their lives.
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/..., https://hbr.org/2009/09/nummi-what-toyota-learned, https://consumercal.org/toyatanummi-blue-ribbon-commission-w...
Urban Missouri and urban Virginia are essentially identical culturally, and the rural areas of each state are very similar. I haven't been an immigrant from abroad in either state, but I'd expect the experiences of those once arrived in USA to be fairly similar as well.
So instead of Americans owning American companies, and employing 100% American labor, most of the factories have shut down, and the ones that are left are owned and operated by the Chinese and employ a large fraction of foreign workers, although not a majority. How on Earth is this better? The globalists at The Atlantic have clearly outdone themselves with this backwards logic.
Ceteris paribus, China's size means it has a larger market, more competitors and therefore a larger market share.
Economically it's superior. If a robot, or a Chinese factory, can produce goods cheaper, why not take advantage of it? Cheaper goods benefit everyone. The pie isn't finite. A more efficient economy means a bigger pie, not fewer slices.
This is the free market in action. It has dictated people want chinese goods more at their price point than american goods at theirs.
The overall quality of life worldwide has gone up. 96% of the world's population - 7.2 billion people are not American.
If you are a human being you should be happy humanity is better rather than selfishly worrying about the 4% of the world whose lives improved less than the rest.
If globalization is needed so badly to lift the world, we need to find a way to change it in a way that doesn't destabilize us in the process.
Thats an unrelated issue that much of the rest of the world has solved a long time ago.
If healthcare in America has shown anything it's that Americans will proudly throw other Americans under the bus if it suits themselves.
I'd question whether the people you are prioritising care about you at all.
Yet, you somehow focus on people living within artificial boundaries created by your government.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/0...
Well, in many cases (but not all of course), people who put "country" first, get much better outcomes in the end. In fact, if you look at the poor half of the world -- it's where everybody mostly put themselves first.
So I argue that for the best life quality, there should be some balance between the two. Although figuring out the best balance is a very hard problem.
this is easy to say until it's your family's livelihood.
Have you seen the elephant graph? [0] The reason people are upset is not because they are selfish, it's because the people above them are. The wealthiest of the wealthy 0.1% have profited immensely, the lower half of the world's population has been lifted out of poverty, and this has all come at the expense of the American blue collar worker. Factories have closed, the opioid epidemic has claimed tens of thousands of lives, and everybody is calling these suffering people selfish and lazy. It's no wonder they want to give everyone the middle finger and vote for Trump.
[0] http://voxeu.org/article/greatest-reshuffle-individual-incom...
Correlation doesn't mean causation. The blue collar workers of America have lost purchasing power. That is a fact. Chinese factory workers are better off, that's another one. But blue collar workers from other countries are better off than their American counterparts. How's that possible?
Health care, education, name it and you will see that don't work anymore. War again drugs, a complete disaster. But that's because the 0.1% stopped paying their fair amount of taxes and have converted the public services into their own private business in name of a "small government" while these same rules don't apply to them because they are "too big to fail". And has nothing, or little, to do with Chinese factory workers. Americans have voted for their own government to not help them anymore. It is not just poor people that suffer that lack of services but all the general population, except for the 0.1% that has money to pay for it all.
America have grown a lot in this past years, redistribution of wealth has failed. The 0.1% talks about not wanting a "class warfare" while fighting one.
Everything is linked in the economy. When I say that it's come at the expense of these workers, I don't mean somebody made the call to take money from them and give it to Chinese workers. I mean that in the grand game of musical chairs, they are the ones who have been left standing.
I am a supporter of single payer health care and vastly reduced tuition (or the elimination of the university's role in modern society, but that's another conversation), but I also like the idea of freedom to travel and open borders, and I've never found a way to square the two. I used to burn with envy when I read that such and such writer or artist moved to Paris from the US like it was no problem at all - how was it possible 100 years ago but not now? France offered fewer protections then, and had less to lose from letting people in.
This is deeply misguided. I strongly encourage you to look at the evidence about the impact of immigrants on government's fiscal positions. In both the Germany and the US there is strong evidence that immigrants contribute far more in taxes than the benefits they receive. It's possible to have a discussion about the economic impact on immigration but it requires examination of facts, not cockamie speculation that the government "loses" on every immigrant.
About two months ago, it was the beginning of a weekend and there were no clinics open that would see me until the coming Monday. Something was rapidly deteriorating the skin on my hands. So I called an advice line, and the nurse on the line said that I should go to an emergency department. So I went to an emergency department, waited a few hours and was then seen by a doctor who could not diagnose me. She gave me a prescription for a week course of antibiotics and a topical cream, and said that a dermatology office would call me over the next week. I filled the prescription on my (thankfully exceptionally good) employer drug coverage. I followed the prescription regimen for the week and did not hear from the dermatology office, thankfully the cream was enough to apply according to the directions for up to a month and was seemingly keeping the deterioration of my hands at bay. I waited another two weeks for the dermatologist to call, and they did not. I called the hospital and was connected to a representative which did not speak or understand English very well and ended up being connected to the wrong department; then I called the hospital again and the lady at the hospital connected me with the dermatology office which was to receive my referral. After about 25 minutes I was able to deduce that the ER had not yet faxed the referral to the dermatology office, so I called the ER and thankfully still had my discharge form on hand to reference and help them track down the referral. I made sure they faxed the referral, and confirmed with the dermatology office which told me that I would be scheduled for about Tuesday last week (and would receive a call when it was confirmed). I still haven't heard from the dermatologists and I'll probably have to nag them again. I'm currently attempting to treat the condition by myself by reading random articles and blogs, and medical research on Baidu Wenku (thank god for high IQ) and doing okay, though it's not eliminated.
For critical/emergency care, Canada's system often works quite well (though sometimes fails horribly). If you have anything less than an emergency, or need dental work or drugs, you need your own insurance. That said, the fields which are still private in Canada (lasik, dental, optical) are reasonable to pay for by yourself if you're middle class. The fields which are covered by government insurance are illegal to pay for by yourself.
Americans[1] is not the same as Americans[3], there is some overlap (in the sense that Americans can own shares in US companies) but Americans[1] are mostly aristocrats, and whether those aristocrats live in New York or Shanghai shouldn't matter much to Americans[3].
Besides that, "most of the factories have shut down" is false, American manufacturing hasn't shrunk, it just employs less people and more capital. Most Americans ([1] and [3]) work in the service sector now. This is a change that is orthogonal to the nationality of factory owners, and is coming to China soon enough.
The learning and adjustment curve will be difficult, but I hope both parties can navigate it well and prosper.
This is because the US has been able to provide these types of jobs for the majority of the population for many generations. What is a sinecure from the global perspective is normal from the US perspective.
Being able to consistently trade time for money is the core sinecure belief, the lack of risk is key. This is only possible in highly controlled almost game like situations. The "real world" requires proof of value and often a lot of risk.
A pet theory if mine is that many American companies use off shoring to continue to provide sinecure benefits for their important workers while lowering costs. Those workers don't see it as such as they already have sinecures in this model. The offshoring is necessary for company survival.