exporting jobs - quotes and descriptions to inspire creative writing

Now just to make your head spin I’m going to take you back into the past. It’ll be fun, sort of. We are going to go the USA in the days when they had manufacturing, before anyone thought of outsourcing it. We'll have the chance to be the pioneers of that process and get very rich indeed. Perhaps you’re losing your taste for money by now, but let’s play along anyway. It’s what Father wants. Look around you, there are factories and workers. They really make stuff here, but underpaid as they are we can pay buttons for the same number of workers in China and treat them way worse. Our input cost goes down and we can sell our product for the same or more despite wasting all that fuel in shipping. Great, huh? Plus the pollution is over there, we won’t have to see the misery often, only when we "inspect."

Apparently if the workers start jumping from the roof tops to their deaths we might have to pay to put up a fence to stop them, shame really, but it is the cheapest option. What? I’m doing it again? OK, you got me, it’s another one of my wind-ups. But you see the point I’m making here. Is it right to get rich from the misery and exploitation of other human beings and pollute their land? The money makers say "yes," but do we really want a dog eat dog world with no morality? I don’t and I’m putting my faith in your God given nature not to want one either. When did "fairness" become an idea you were supposed to “grow out of” or “toughen up” from? Anyway, that wasn’t the point of this little trip, just a freebie ;)

Back to the USA. We just got rid of the jobs, exported them overseas to people we could treat as slaves. Now what? What does the American worker do? Some don’t get rehired of course and struggle, but on balance the country (and other western nations) will move to "service" economies. Sounds OK really, but what does it really mean? For the most part it means inventing jobs that don’t need doing, tying up citizens to meaningless jobs by debt...