Reply #59: " Are the workers in France migrants, and therefore worse than the workers in California" [View All]

I can't answer. If the people in France exporting to Spain are working for a French company, they're not migrants. If they're working for a Spanish company, they are, because products should be made where used.

But the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the Californians. In terms of where jobs should be located, I can't see why we should pay a lot of attention to political divisions, especially when they're both more and less than they seem.

To me, California and New York are like Russia and Spain in terms of jobs, not like Paris and Marseilles. To the extent we seem like a single country it's only because of a common language and 230+ years of power-grabbing by the national government, something Europe hasn't undergone yet. But we're really not a single country, nor were we intended to be.

So I see your exemplary people working in California for a NY company supplying goods to NY as virtual migrants, in the same way the Okies are universally considered by historians and sociologists to have been physical migrants in their move to the west coast in search of work.

And in terms of better/worse I agree that your French workers shipping 40 miles are almost certainly much less bad than Californians shipping 3K miles, for a given class of product.

My sense is that, if we want to stay in business as a species, we must urgently re-evaluate our conventions in terms of their toxicity. So in general and ultimately we should regard work as being located correctly only if the worker's commute is no more than a comfortable walk or short bicycle ride away, and the product of her/his labor is consumed within local cartage range. OR is exported rather than repatriated (i.e., the producing organization is local to the workers, not the consumers).