Murdering manufacturing ‘strictly business’
http://www.thestand.org/2016/02/murdering-u-s-manufacturing-strictly-business/In the week before Valentine’s Day, United Technologies expressed its love for its devoted Indiana employees, workers whose labor had kept the corporation profitable, by informing 2,100 of them at two facilities that it was shipping their factories, their jobs, their communities’ resources to Mexico.carrier-exports-jobs-free-trade_frontA few workers shouted obscenities at the corporate official. Some walked out. Others openly wept as United Technologies shattered their hopes, their dreams, their means to pay middle-class mortgages.
Three days later, 1,336 workers at Philadelphia’s largest remaining manufacturer, Cardone, learned that company planned to throw them out too and build brake calipers in Mexico instead.
Two weeks earlier, a Grand Rapids, Mich., company called Dematic did the same thing to its 300 workers.
No surprise. In the first decade of this century, America lost 56,190 factories, 15 a day.Republican presidential candidates talk incessantly of building a physical wall to keep impoverished Mexican immigrants out of America. What they fail to offer is an economic barrier to prevent the likes of United Technologies and Cardone and Dematic from impoverishing American workers by exporting their jobs to Mexico.
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One: we unilaterally impose tariffs on countries with poor people ("cheap Third World labor"
. That's what republicans did for 12 years before FDR eventually switched us to the 'multilateral agreement approach'. Trump says he will do it against Mexico and China to begin with. There would probably be more added to that list as time went on. That would also have the effect of getting us out of NAFTA and the WTO.
Two: we negotiate liberal multilateral agreements that prioritize and enforce high labor and environmental standards and business regulation (as FDR tried this with the ITO - rejected by republicans - and the EU implements today). Low-wage countries would still have some advantage but less so with strong unions and strict environmental standards and their advantage would diminish over time with their economic gains being shared with workers rather than skimmed off by their elites keeping their workers poor indefinitely.
The unilateral approach is 'easier'. The US is strong enough that no one can stop us from doing it if we want to. Politically, it is 'easier' since it has bipartisan support - thanks to Trump and the tea party. The results may be unpredictable - hopefully better than the last time it was tried in the 1920's - but it would not be unusual for people to believe that "it will be different this time".
Here in Detroit, where unions and the middle class both got really big, we understand how important these things called "manufacturing jobs" are. It's how the economy got healthy and the nation strong so we could beat the Depression and the fascists and the commies. While we fought over who got what piece of the action, we never thought the owners would sell us out, though.
It is murder.
