If you want people generally to work less and earn more, how are you going to reduce the amount of work there is for them to do? Also how are you going to provide the additional goods and services these people will be able to afford (inflation? What dat?) if less work is being done to provide them? Sounds fascinating.
We could start manufacturing those more expensive but better quality goods, which most of people could not afford. There is no problem with manufacturing enough goods. There is problem that many people only have money for the cheapest shit which breaks easily and needs to be replaced soon which costs even more money and destroys environment.
It’s all very well saying “we could just”, but how would you bring about this change? How do you persuade people to want different things and make different choices? That’s the interesting question.
Production is expanding elsewhere in SE Asia but those countries are much smaller and taking time and a lot of capital to ramp up.
Where are all these new workers going to come from, and if they could work productively already why aren’t they?
None of this makes a lick of sense.
Why would they work more productively if that is not needed? They would have to make more things, which people wouldn't buy because there is overproduction. If you have order for 1000 items every week, you make 1000 items every week, even when you could make 5000 items every week. You can slow your production line, this way workers are more relaxed and you have time for maintenance. It's not like every employee out there is used at 100% utilisation, that would not be sustainable. Many times you employ as many people as you can just because it's cheaper than using more automation. If you need to produce more and can't find employes, you can pay them more. If you can't find enough employes at all, that means price per employee is so high that you can now employ some robots. Yeah, it takes time, but global change in time of employment is also not going to happen overnight.
So, we provided more products to people who now have money. And now you are asking "Who will pay". Well, the people who now have the money to pay for it? That was the reason for increased production in the first place?