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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

for countries that pay a worker $10 a day, put a tariff on the goods produced by that worker to total $10

for countries that pay a worker $15 dollars a day put a tariff on the goods produced by that work to total $4

therefore someone importing goods produced by one worker in one day from the lower wage country would spend $20 for the goods from the lower wage country but only $19 for the goods for the higher wage country giving a competitive advantage for higher wages

obviously that is a simplistic example but that's what i mean using tariffs to incentivize better behavior and level the playing field so the most exploitation doesn't make the most money

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If the shirt costs $10 in labor, and the pre-tariff wholesale price is also $10, how does the manufacturer make a profit? Surely the wholesale price would at least include some markup for profit? So like $10 labor + $3 markup (per employee-day) + $10 tariff ($23) contrasted with $15 labor + $3 markup + $4 tariff ($22), in your scenario.

But now you see that the low wage manufacturer has a third option, $10 labor + $1 markup + 10 tariff ($21), which would maintain their competitive advantage and in this scenario only cut their daily per employee profit by $2, as opposed to the $5 hit they would suffer by raising their employee wages to $15 day from $10.

That's not really what I mean.

What I'm saying is set a minimum wage on imports. Set a global minimum wage. Anyone importing something from somewhere that doesn't meet that minimum wage would have to pay a tariff greater than the amount saved with low wages.

The goal is to increase competition and improve fairness between locations. You wouldn't want to do it all at once at first, rather a gradual increase. You wouldn't want to distort the local economy too much so don't insist somewhere pay 10x the median local wage. Lots of things you would do which are more complex with an eye for fairness and competitiveness and definitely not trying to raise everyone by force to American levels of wages, but always measured amounts of pressure.

These suggestions are... not based in reality. Lesotho has a GDP per capita of something like $1000 per year.

How do you expect them to magic higher salaries?

That’s a nice idea, but I’m skeptical—where is the new wealth coming from that will allow Lesotho to pay its workers more? It’s not an issue of strong-arming some bad guys in Lesotho to pay their workers more using tariffs as a negotiation tool.

I feel that conflating tariffs with some sort of negotiation tool to bring about positive global change is disingenuous, because the real aim is clearly protectionism.

It's coming from the people who buy the exported goods.

This would mean, of course, that the people who happen to work for an export-oriented factory become much more wealthy than most people in Lesotho. So you might reasonably wonder whether it's better to make twice as many workers half as wealthy. Labor advocates believe the answer is no: paying some people genuinely good wages both creates and encourages further development, while paying a larger number of people "good enough" wages encourages poor countries to race to the bottom competing for the lowest standard of "good enough".

It's clearly not protectionism, because you wouldn't put tariffs on everything - including all the raw materials and parts you need to import, if you wanted your local industries to succeed. And you'd have a coherent industrial policy to go along with it.

Protectionism is France and England putting tariffs on each others cheese. America putting tariffs on Canadian lumber.

Putting tariffs on places that have a 20x factor difference in wages is something else.

And protectionism isn't necessarily a dirty word. It's often valuable to save your local industries from being wiped out and to not have a foreign country have complete control of a necessity.

My point is only that these tariffs cannot be motivated by protectionism, since they are not targeted and will also disadvantage local industry.

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