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partly this choice is a matter of what's politically acceptable.
from the 1920s onward, the dominant industrial logic in the united states tended toward relatively high wages. folk say that the logic extended outward from ford's 10-dollar day policy, which was linked both to limiting labor turnover in detroit during the 20s and enabling the creation of a credit system that enabled workers to acquire debt and so become consumers of the cars they produced. by the 50s, this basic logic had been shifted around the mechanism of collective bargaining.
so long as industrial production was understood as a national affair, so long as it operated within the confines of a nation-state as if the nation-state was a kind of natural boundary, it made sense (due to political pressure in the end, so by way of the union movement) for employers to see wage levels as in part a social cost. because manufacturers across the board incurred the same costs more or less, inside the odd world of capitalism things kinda worked.
this was all back in the day when indices of economic activity centered on production.
since the early 70s they've been stock market activity, which signaled a shift away from production, so away from a the politics associated with it (there's more that could be said about this, but hey, this is a messageboard so shorthand) to an emphasis on the movement of capital. this was of a piece with an ideological campaign that resulted in that lovely synonym for exploitation we call globalization. neo-liberal style.
so if all you're looking at is capital flows and such, then cheap labor is a no-brainer.
if the political context is such that paying some attention to social consequences is important, then cheap labor is counter-productive.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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