Richard D. Wolff

The immediate narrow issue is that GM, to escape Trump tweets, is moving canadian jobs to Mexico while GM waits for better circumstances to do the same to US jobs. More profoundly, this is all about the radical change in the global capital-labor balance since the 1980s. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and changes in China coupled with new technology (jet air travel and the internet) made it possible to bring billions of new workers into capital's orbit, available for hire and at far lower wages than had been built up in the west and Japan. So businesses have been moving to take advantage of lower wages and higher profits. In an historical irony, the development of capitalism drove up wages in the old centers of capitalism (western Europe, north America and Japan) while driving them down in the old colonial and post-colonial territories. Now the low wages in the latter plus technical changes etc enable capitalists to move from higher to lower wage locations for production. US and canada just told to suffer and absorb all the social costs as the rich get richer off of the lower-wage workers.