The part about giving a competitive advantage to local producers is true, though…
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
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.
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.
How do you expect them to magic higher salaries?
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.
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".
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.
A truely laughable suggestion.
Whether that works out better for the exploited is uncertain. But the alternative argument is effectively "these poor countries should be happy to let themselves be exploited" it is their only way out of poverty. And that really doesn't sit right with me.
