You Can Always Eat Your Pink Slip
I won’t attempt to defend the sorry record of the Democrats in protecting your economic interests and employment prospects. But can you be sure that the Republicans care a whit about you either?
The North American Free Trade Agreement… was opposed by 65% of U.S. citizens in 1993. That was just before President Bill Clinton, backed by all but three of the nation’s 1,300 daily newspapers, eked out a narrow victory for NAFTA with mostly Republican support.
On Oct. 4, 1996, the Fortune 500 company Johnson Controls in Milwaukee honored workers at its Brew City valve plant with a party to show appreciation for their years of dedication, with special gifts to workers with 15, 20, 25 and 30 years of service. On Oct. 9, the workers received another token of the corporation’s appreciation: the announcement that their plant was closing and the jobs were being moved to Mexico. Wages at the new Mexico plant: about 72 cents an hour.
Since 2000, Wisconsin has witnessed the net loss of 100,000 factory jobs — one-sixth of its manufacturing base — with many jobs moving to Mexico, China and other low-wage, high-repression sites. Moreover, this epidemic of blue-collar jobs shifting overseas may be only the forerunner of a devastating “offshoring” plague affecting highly skilled white-collar jobs, heretofore largely immune.The effects of NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements, such as the Permanent Normalization of Trade Relations with China and the Central American Trade Agreement, have fostered majority opposition to “free trade” even among affluent Americans.
Overall, 77% of Americans oppose the offshoring of U.S. jobs, according to a 2006 Pew Research poll.
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the impact of globalization — a.k.a. outsourcing — on the U.S. economy is the prospect that what we’ve seen so far is only the beginning. Princeton economist Alan Blinder, a self-described “free trader down to his toes,” has estimated that up to 42 million highly technical U.S. jobs — ranging from computer programmers to accountants to economists — are “highly off-shorable” (Wall Street Journal, 3/28/07). He predicts this next wave of job shifts will go far beyond relatively low-skill jobs like those in “call centers” used by insurance and credit-card companies, and reach even people with Ph.Ds. Favored sites will likely be low-wage nations with large numbers of well-educated people, like China, India and countries in Eastern Europe. U.S.-based corporations that relocate professional jobs overseas will thus be able to rely on the public expenditures for higher education made by other nations, even as they fight to lower their taxes in the U.S. and thus undermine higher education here.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman reserves special venom for “The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor”… the term he uses for … protecting unionized jobs in the U.S. None of Friedman’s anger is directed at the corporations responsible for miserable wages and living conditions. [He’s married to a billionairess.]
The world’s three richest individuals [Carlos Slim of Mexico, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett] of possess more wealth than the combined Gross Domestic Product of the poorest 48 nations.
NAFTA has fed corporate America’s hunger for low-wage labor without producing the promised uplift in the lives of Mexicans. NAFTA produced a 50% increase in the number of factories along the Mexican border, where wages typically run 70 cents to $1 an hour. NAFTA produced a 50% increase in the number of factories along the Mexican border, where wages typically run 70 cents to $1 an hour. Indeed, a Carnegie Endowment study found that wages along the Mexican border have actually fallen by about 25% since NAFTA. This is due to an oversupply of workers, combined with the crushing of union-organizing drives as Mexican government policy.
As Gustavo Elizondo, the mayor of Ciudad Juárez, now crammed with U.S.-owned low-wage plants, has said: “Every year, we get poorer and poorer even though we create more and more wealth.”
That’s one reason that, contrary to promises made early on, NAFTA has utterly failed to stem the tide of illegal immigration. There were 2.5 million Mexican illegals in 1995; eight million more have crossed the border since then. NAFTA, by permitting heavily subsidized U.S. corn and other agribusiness products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven many thousands of Mexican farmers off the land. Some 1.5 million to 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those who cross the border to feed their families.
“The fundamental flaw with the current regime of world trade is that the only interests considered are those of investors and private capital,” says Doug Drake, the Milwaukee-based organizing coordinator for United Steel Workers. “Workers, community, health and safety and the environment don’t matter. So these trade deals like NAFTA are one-sided structures where investors and banks are the only ones protected….
Content adapted from:
Sorry, your job’s been outsourced!
by Roger Bybee, published by The Isthmus of Madison WI on Friday 11/02/2007