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When supply is high and demand is low, the price of a good drops as producers compete to get rid of inventory.
This, of course, is opposite of the situation when supply is low and demand is high, in which case, buyers bid up the price in competition with other buyers in order to get some product rather than wind up with nothing.
So how does this apply to the current labor situation?
The number of jobs available represents the demand for workers. The number of people looking for jobs represents the supply of workers.
When there are lots of jobs available, and most of the people who want to work are employed, employers are willing (actually, forced) to pay more to their employees, in order to have enough workers to keep their businesses running.
In the opposite case, when there are few jobs, and lots of (unemployed) people looking for work, people are willing to take almost any job that they can get at the lowest wages offered by employers.
As the lady said in the OP: “There are no bad jobs now. Any job is a good job.”
This economic fact explains two effects of offshoring jobs, why it is done, and why offshoring has to be made unprofitable if the U.S. economy is ever going to recover.
Aside from the use of cheaper labor and the avoidance of taxes, the corporations offshore jobs to produce a large pool of unemployed workers willing to take any job at the most meager of wages in order to survive. The corporations can even force current employees to take wage and benefit reductions in order to keep their jobs by pointing to the large numbers of unemployed who would gladly take their jobs.
The employers cry out that they have no power over this situation. It is all the fault of "free trade" and the "global economy". Employers have to act this way in order to compete, they claim.
HOGWASH! There are no such economic conditions. "Free trade" and "global economy" are corporate propaganda buzz words.
The U.S. unemployment crisis was purposely generated by the corporations to weaken labor's ability to negotiate pay and working conditions. The mechanisms used are the corporate cartel agreements such as NAFTA, the WTO, and its ilk.
So-called "stimulus" packages, and "retraining" of workers for "green" technology will have NO long term effect on the REAL economy, so long as NAFTA and its ilk make it profitable to send jobs (including "green" jobs) offshore. Stimulus packages and retraining are sops to Americans to make us think that some useful solutions are being promoted. That is simply untrue.
NAFTA, the WTO, so-called Most Favored Nation trading status (MFN), and other corporate cartel agreements are the ROOT CAUSE of the unemployment problem and the recession/depression that we are experiencing.
Another fraud promoted by the corporations is that prices of goods are lower with offshoring and that prices will go up if they manufacture goods here, and this will make goods "too expensive" for many Americans. This is totally false in many ways.
Offshoring of manufacturing jobs only lowers the costs of goods initially in the short run. In the long term, prices rise on imported goods. For one thing, companies entering the offshoring game later on do NOT pass along cost savings to the consumer, but pocket the difference as profit. Secondly, as trade deficits increase and the U.S. has to go into debt to import goods, the value of the dollar decreases (in the long term), and so we see creeping inflation in the form of slowly rising prices and reduced quality (poisoned food, anyone?).
Moreover, lower prices for imports do not do you any good if you are underemployed or lose wages and benefits. If you don't make it, you can't spend it, no matter how low prices go, and at this point, creeping inflation is driving up prices even on foreign made cheap goods.
Finally, even if prices would rise as jobs are brought back to the U.S., the American consumer would come out ahead, as a booming job market would automatically bring about higher wages to offset the higher prices. If you are working and making good wages, you can afford to pay a little more.
A side benefit of high employment is that working people pay taxes, and that gives governments enough money to provide services such as maintaining infrastructure, education, police and fire services, paying into Social Security and Medicare funds, etc., etc.
The antitax people are getting their wish of not having to pay taxes as they lose their jobs.
The ONLY action to save the REAL economy is to bring jobs back to the U.S. by getting rid of the corporate cartel agreements such as NAFTA, the WTO, MFN status agreements and all of their ilk that make it profitable for the corporations to offshore jobs and avoid taxes.
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