Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump don’t agree on many things, but they both think China is ripping off American workers. Bernie responding to Trump’s tariffs:
As someone who strongly opposed disastrous unfettered free trade deals with China, Mexico and other low-wage countries, I understand that we need trade policies that benefit American workers, not just large corporations. Targeted tariffs can be a powerful tool to stop corporations from outsourcing American jobs. They can help level the playing field for American autoworkers or steelworkers to compete fairly against companies who have moved production to countries where they can pay starvation wages.
That’s … wrong? Maybe it’s just how Boomers, socialist and Trumpian alike, see the world. But in my limited experiences, autoworkers in China are not starving.
Sure, China has its fair share of inequality, but the reality is probably closer to what Tim Cook saw a few years ago:
The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor costs. I’m not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low labor costs country many years ago. […] The reason is because of the skill, the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is. […] The tooling skill is very deep here. In the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.
An Inconvenient Thought 