Why The American Shoe Disappeared And Why It’s So Hard To Bring It Back
18th September 2021
For a shoe-factory job paying $12 an hour, the actual cost of shoemaking — when adding benefits — grows to $16 an hour, compared with about $3 an hour in China, said Mike Jeppesen, head of global operations at Wolverine Worldwide, which owns brands like Merrell, Sperry and Keds. And that cost quadruples after wholesale and retail markups, he said, ballooning into a $50 price difference between a pair made in the U.S. versus in China.
Note the lack of mention of Minimum Wage regulations. The only way around the barrier of expensive labor is to exclude as much labor as possible through increased automation, and that doesn’t do domestic employment for low-skilled workers a bit of good. The Underclass benefits from cheap prices only to the extent that they can find the money in the first place, and government welfare benefits only go so far.