"It's not a labor advantage," said Doug Bassett, a spokesman for the American Furniture Manufacturers Committee for Legal Trade, the lobbying group that filed the antidumping petition with the International Trade Commission.
South Korea is losing to China its low-cost labor advantage as some South Korean companies this fall adopt a five-day workweek and raise wage rates to near-American levels.
Professor Piper, who studies automotive manufacturing, said the biggest labor advantage of Japanese companies at plants in Canada is their ability to easily adjust employment and production levels to meet demand and work rules, flexibility that allows them to quickly assign workers to different tasks.
Will the labor advantage be lost in tax and social security costs?
Or leverage India's labor advantage, take its competitors to the cleaners and give shareholders higher returns?
Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.
China's labor advantage is nearly meaningless in expensive high-tech devices like iPhones and it can't possibly outweigh the shipping costs for most heavy goods like steel pipes or wallboard.
Complex ideas — the division of labor, the advantages of trade — become lucid to the non-economist for the first, and perhaps last, time.
Although there are competing claims of unfair/unwarranted labor market advantages and disadvantages being made by some Han and some minority job seekers, others feel that employers don't care much about ethnic status.
But the narrowing of that wage gap does mean that the labor cost advantage some of these other countries have enjoyed is eroding a little, particularly if there are other cost-based advantages to producing in the United States (like access to cheap natural gas or being closer to your consumers).
