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Purchasing power is the missing link here. Stuff in India is cheaper. It's not that the American software dev demands a higher living standard than the Indian ones settle for, it's that rent, taxes, etc. are more expensive for the American one than the Indian one, so if he settled for the same gross wages he'd wind up much worse off. The only way for him to compete would be to move to India as well.
I'm not talking about Indians working remotely from India, but Indians moving to the US for work (e.g. the ongoing debate about H1B visas).
I'm marginally more sympathetic to an American coder who complains about being undercut by an Indian in Mumbai who can live like a king on US minimum wage. An American coder who lives in SF who complains about being undercut by an Indian coder who also lives in SF? Sorry, don't care. Either git gud or adjust your salary expectations.
The indian coder in SF sends back remittances to his family to live like kings and has the full possibility of returning with whatever savings they have which will go far further in India than the US. It's not a different situation at all. Yes, I too would be willing to work for less if I knew it was purchasing my family a mansion back in my hometown that I can return to as a conquering hero.
Also, yeah, before you even bring it up - people are also willing to work for less in worse conditions when they have a deportation hanging over their head. For that matter, they'd probably be willing to work for even less if we pointed a gun at their head and told em to get cracking or else. I don't want to compete with slaves for wages either - guess I need to adjust my salary expectations.
When you allow people with massively different and negative externalities driving their wage acceptance criteria down to compete with people who don't have the same externalities hanging over their head, you are transferring the consequences of those horsehair swords onto others. Surely the people who didn't previously have to compete with the sword of damocles can at least ask you to stop doing that?
Stop, please.
How many coders in the US have lost their jobs to people in the US illegally, a fact which was known to their employers, and which their employers used as leverage with which to pay them subsistence wages? I'd be amazed if it was triple digits. How many coders in the US have lost their jobs to literal slaves or indentured servants? I mean, has it ever happened?
Arguing about trees when the forest is burning down, or are you seriously contending that immigration - legal and otherwise - as well as offshoring, has not seriously depressed US labor wages in nearly every sector?
And yes, the fact is that US companies using offshored sweatshop slavery destroyed much of the US factory labor class. This is terrible in its own right -I shouldn't need to connect it to coders for you to care - but yes, this depresses coding wages too. The economy is interconnected and the general state of labor prices affects wages everywhere.
You will have to disambiguate this. I think I presented a convincing case that, if you look at the decline in total inflation-adjusted wages in the manufacturing sector in the US over time (as opposed to wages per employee), most of that decline is attributable to automation and mechanisation. This is also true of agriculture, for much the same reasons. If you look at all American employees who don't work in agriculture, in 1945, 37% of them worked in manufacturing: by 1977, this figure had fallen to 22%. This is before any of Reagan's neoliberal policies and nearly twenty years before NAFTA. Perhaps if there had been no offshoring and less immigration in the decades to come, the decline over the following fifty years wouldn't have been quite as steep, but I still find it hard to envision a scenario in which more than 10% of the American non-farm workforce works in manufacturing.
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Ah. In that case I don't entirely disagree (though you could still gesture at citizens having to pay taxes etc. that non-naturalized immigrants don't have to deal with), but I hope you understand the confusion given that you were making this argument seemingly in reply to a sentence which began with "offshoring is forcing American workers to compete with every person in the world".
Yeah, that's a fair point.
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