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| 31. "So what?" retort the clothing workers from the north eastern United States, the mill owners in northern France, and the weavers from Manchester who have lost their jobs and seen factories close as a result of Third World imports. | 31. Ah - the dream of maintaining the status quo. We too would
like to stay young forever but we can't. If one is to become a wealthy country
one must on average do more productive work. Change is with us. New jobs are
being created at the same time. Move on! More new jobs are being created in the
world as the global market expands, including in the advanced nations.
As a note, despite rising unemployment in Europe, jobs are not being lost. There are more workers in Europe than ever, but the number of jobs has not expanded as fast as the workforce so there is also more unemployment. |
| 32. Relocation seems to have become a catch phrase which hides a far more complex reality. It is only the most visible and most easily understandable element, and the easiest target for criticism, because it happens "abroad", in a general shift in production methods, as part of a broad cost-cutting strategy. Relocation is to an extent the twin sister to investment in the streamlining of the factories of the north. | 32. Relocations also occur domestically, it is part of the normal growth and development of an economy. It is a sign of increasing productivity that leads to rising standards of living. |
| 33. This economic explanation, however, does not change the reality of the situation. The overall picture is still one of high unemployment, regional depression, and young workers facing a dismal future. Employment in the textile industries or electronic assembly lines of the old industrial regions is disappearing, and is not be replaced, as the optimists would have us believe, by more rewarding jobs in the high technology sector. Only the lucky few can make the change. Of the 647,000 workers who lost their jobs when the textile and shoe factories of New England closed, notes Richard Barnet, only 3 per cent found work in new technology. | 33. Losing a job is traumatic. The solution is in finding a
new one in a country that keeps an open and thriving general economic
activity. Many middle managers have lost their jobs through "restructuring" of
major industries recently. Many are finding new activity by working out of
their "home offices" as advisors and consultants to smaller firms which
couldn't afford their talents before. The computer and communications
revolution is providing the means and the opportunities to adapt to change.
Gradualism in the rate of change is a key to ameliorating the trauma.
Employment in the garment and textile industries in the United States held roughly steady at two million jobs from 1940s-to the 1980s at an increasing cost to consumers. By 1980 it was costing through tariffs and quotas more than US$60,000 to protect each US$20,000 job. The tragedy of the textile and garment industry is that for 40 years policy created an unsustainable enticement for young people to enter a dead-end industry, and forgo a career in a more dynamic industry. It is truly tragic to think of the billions of dollars lost, the standard of living gains foregone, and the trauma caused to workers misled by their unions and government in a fruitless attempt to live in the past. |
| 34. The service sector has absorbed some of the "excluded", but there are "services" and "services". Far from the rosy image of a change of career with new jobs in the laboratory or in high tech industries, most of the skilled workers have had to turn their hand to whatever they can get, working in hamburger restaurants or for express delivery services. Those who find work earn much less than before, while the rest join the ranks of the unemployed, the underemployed, or the socially excluded. The disappearance of relatively well paid industrial jobs also makes integration into the labour market, and therefore into society, more difficult for the disinherited minority. And "deindustrialisation" is a factor behind the immigration crisis in western Europe and the problems facing the black minority in the US. It is within this context of decline and depression that a significant part of the labour world or the jobless world is now facing the phenomenon of globalisation. | 34. How many machinists are flipping hamburgers and displacing
qualified teenagers from their first jobs? Not many we believe. And not for
long, anyway.
Deindustrialization in developed countries is a myth. While employment is declining in industry, industrial output and industrial exports are increasing. Worldwide industrialization is creating many new jobs in places where they are sorely needed. It is an interesting trick to talk of well paid industrial jobs, when in fact, non-union service sector jobs have higher average incomes than do factory jobs. It is hard to imagine such a racial statement by a union organization. Unions from their founding in the United States have excluded black and minority workers to the best of their ability. The hiring halls of the 50's were all white, and apprentice-ships in the trades were not given to blacks. Blacks were employed in service jobs because the trade unions drove them out of industry. Trade unions are still opponents of affirmative action, and other integration policies. To blame the problems facing the blacks in the US on globalization, is to deny the sordid history of racism in the union movement. Of course none of this has anything to do with EPZs, but is rather a diatribe against worldwide economic development. Change is ever with us. The Luddites solution is not a solution. The only organization that doesn't seem to change is the Union bureaucracy. |
| 35. It is a situation which has strong implications for the development of worldwide solidarity among workers swept up and scattered far and wide by this new wave. It also has serious implications for the political situation in the countries affected, as behind the unemployment figures and social insecurity rises the spectre of populism and racism, manipulating the feelings of insecurity among the most vulnerable members of society. | 35. The situation has no implication for the development of worldwide solidarity among workers, because that is not the true objectives of the international trade union leaders. They prefer local monopolies on labor and a reduction of globalization as shown throughout the earlier paragraphs. Perhaps so that they can prey on populism, racism, and feeling of insecurity, as they are in this article, to gain trade union power. |
| 36. Hence the challenge is political. "Virtuous logic"
(Editor: ensuring that globalisation does not occur at the expense of one group
of countries), notes Pierre Sohlberg, "is neither automatic nor spontaneous. It
supposes that the deflationist logic of competition between enterprises and
nations is counterbalanced by national and international regulations which
ensure global demand is maintained at a high enough level to ensure world
growth. It also supposes that, within each country, governments ensure the
transfers of income and employment that will allow for an equitable
distribution of the costs and benefits of international trade. | 36. In the end the distribution question is always political. Markets do not ensure equitable distribution in the short term, but "Virtuous Logic" a new formulation of Pareto Optimization is a theoretical construction without much practical use. Like other economic constructs such as "perfect competition", and "supply and demand curves" their assumptions are never met in the real world. It is of no great consequence for as "Often are we right in practice and wrong in theory, and happy we are that this is so." |
| 37. "Finally, it supposes that the economic development set in train is sustainable, in other words, that it is not accompanied by the rapid depletion of natural, nonrenewable resources. These three conditions are only partially met today. Co-ordination of economic policies between the big industrialised countries is virtually nonexistent... The decline in social solidarity in the North, with the rise in liberalism, and the weakness of social policies in the South partly confirm the views of those who claim that globalisation is making the rich in the poor countries richer, and the poor in the rich countries poorer." | 37. Sustainable development shows that union writers have picked up a few new arguments in the last decade. The fact that as applied sustainable development means that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor has not been lost on most developing countries, and they reject the premise. The Hudson Institute has projected that within the next 200 years most of the developing countries today will have income levels equal those of the developed countries of today. Hopefully we can better that deadline. |
| The South | |
| 38. Faced with chronic unemployment and the rise in exclusion in the rich countries, the situation of the Third World seems even more catastrophic. There are of course several "Third Worlds". Some of the NICs are now developed countries. | 38. The rise in exclusions? First the rise of free trade was
the problem to ICFTU, and now the lack of free trade is the problem. This sort
of double-speak indicates a dislike of the whole issue of trade, an issue that
won't go away.
The NICs that are now developed countries got that way by pursuing strategies based on Export Processing Zones. |
| 39. "The standard of living in Singapore" writes Pierre Judet, in "CFDT Aujourd'hui" "is equal to that of Great Britain; in Taiwan it is better than in Spain, and in South Korea better than in Portugal. These countries in turn sub-contract jobs to the low wage areas." | 39. We call it the "Development Stairway". Many countries are now on it. But there are still 100 poor nations that do not yet have EPZs. Work for the 21st Century! |
| 40. The challenge is still immense. In the next twenty years, according to the UN, 38 million job seekers will join the developing countries' labour markets each year, adding to the ranks of the 700 million unemployed and underemployed. Industrial investment and financial assistance are often presented as the best antidote to immigration in the rich countries. Setting up factories in the Third World to mop up the "excess" labour spilling over onto the markets of the industrialised countries seems an obvious solution. It is too obvious however to be really convincing: not only because the aim of an enterprise is not to create jobs but to create profits for its shareholders, but also because the number of jobs created by foreign enterprises is negligible compared to the labour supply. | 40. It is indeed a big problem, and that one reason that
rejecting EPZs, the most effective development tool developed to date, is such
a counter-productive concept.
Short of the unacceptable options such as a bloody war, or executing or starving the surplus population, investment and industrialization are the only solutions. There are already too many people on the land for agriculture to provide jobs for everyone. Foreign capital is an essential component of that development. Except for the diehard central planner the rest of the economists have recognized that it doesn't matter if the purpose of an enterprise is to create jobs. They do it in the pursuit of their own goals. State companies or governments who set out to create jobs have instead destroyed the viability of their organizations, and in the end created high unemployment, low wages, and low productivity. |
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