'GIANT SUCKING SOUND' OF LOST JOBS GETS LOUDER

The American Reporter ^ | July 25, 2003 | Randolph T. Holhut

[B.O. Plenty]

"When workers don't earn enough to buy the products they make and corporations hopscotch the globe searching for ever-cheaper labor, you have a recipe for an economic disaster. But neither the Republicans nor the Democrats want to talk about this."...This sounds kind of ignorant to me. If the workers don't earn enough to buy the products now...they are going to be able to afford them when the AFL/CIO is in charge of wages???? The assumption here is that when workers suddenly start making more money due to manufacturing jobs prices will not rise much!

Labor is the main cost that drives the price of everything....so it makes sense to me that those who cannot afford things now will certainly not be able to afford the higher union prices. Does anyone here think that people should be paid $25 or $30 an hour to bolt fenders onto Fords, or the same to sew up shirts?

What is accomplished by, say, a double wage when prices double?

Maybe someone can explain....

[Tokhtamish]

This most definitely is a cartel arrangement between globalist elites and corrupt politicians.

It is not jobs that are being exported. It is entire careers. I suspect that riding this issue the Democrats will retake the House and Senate if they want to. Bush will have his victory if Dean is the candidate. But working Americans care a lot more about their lives and futures than they do about free market ideology.

[mrb1960]

exactly

[.cnI redruM]

So what's the alternative, giving Boeing corporate welfare?
I fail to see how we can expect to pay our own people $25/hour to do work that people will do in CHina or Vietnam for $0.85 and not go bankrupt.

I hate to be the unpleasant voice of reason here, but people are not hiring workers out of a sense of patriotism. They want the lowest marginal rate of cost per unit of production. Or has Howard Dean Democrat Leon Trotsky would have put it, the highest rate of exploitation leading to the optimization of relative surplus value.

Nor should US companies hire workers under terms against their favor to "win the war on terror" or for any other nationalistic cause. The Pre-Tony Blair Labor Party propped up totally anachronistic industrial enterprises that produced utter garbage to keep their workers employed. It led Margerat Thatcher to remark "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money."

[FITZ]

9 million jobless is pretty high ----we've got a government intent on sending out as many jobs as possible but at the same time has determined we need many more unskilled immigrants moving in. It doesn't add up.

[.cnI redruM]

The economic prosperity of our labor market is fundamentally based upon the affordability and quality of its product. As American Labor Leader and staunch anti-communist Samuel Gompers once remarked "The worst enemy of the American worker is a company that fails to earn a profit."

If labor costs are too high to allow for competitive pricing, the enterprise goes under. Then were all equally unemployed and unemployable.

[Alberta's Child]

The assumption here is that when workers suddenly start making more money due to manufacturing jobs prices will not rise much!

Congratulations -- You hit the nail on the head.

There are far too many people here in the U.S. who seem utterly disconnected from their own role in the "problem" -- invariably, the guy who complains that he ought to get paid $20 for mowing a lawn wouldn't even think of paying more than $5 to have someone else mow his own lawn.

[Tokhtamish]

You are fulfilling Marx's prediction of an "immiserisation of the masses" as capital drives wages further and further down and then drowns in it's own unsold goods.

Tell me, oh Free Traitor, without a prosperous American middle class how will America afford to be a great power ? Without a prosperous middle class will it wish to ?

[.cnI redruM]

How do you export a job? Is there some way I should pack them so they don't spoil? The real issue is whether or not American labor provides sufficient productivity value for the premium it charges compared to other nations. Our people are free to charge what they feel their services are worth. Other people are free to do likewise. If they underbid us and take our job, perhaps we should worry less about our self-esteem and more about enhancing the value of the product we offer for sale.

In other words, the more US labor charges vis-a-vis CHinese labor, the more utterly we have to outperform them in order to justify that inflated price.

[superloser]

Good point, however, this is all short-sightedness.

Since the majority (over 75%) of the world doesn't make enough money to buy a Big Mac twice a week, if the American economy is demolished, the world goes into a depression.

Printing presses and low interest rates won't matter then.

An economy is based on transactions and money flowing through it in a circle.

[KantianBurke]

Please explain Marx's letter and the context. I'll admit I couldn't follow it.

[DonaldC]

Yea, I thought that too before it was my industry that is being outsourced.

[.cnI redruM]

You were promised the right to pursue happiness. You might need a pair of track shoes in order to catch it. Marx based his thesis of immiseration upon the concept of static wealth. In other words if I'm a fat-cat and I take all The Dominoes Pizza, all you'll have to feed your family is an empty box and a few peices of hardened crust. Not to make light of a serious issue, but Marx was a frikking loon.

Andrew Carnige's family came to the US, worked for dirt cheap wages, and stole jobs from good, red-blooded American workers. The soldiers Col. Chamberlain saved the union with at Gettysburg were predominantly broke, low-skill Irish immigrants. I tend to think the problem modern Americans have with a lot of our immigrants is that they are poorer and darker skinned.

It's like when some liberal blowhard like Christopher Hitchens goes on about overpopulation. It's always overpopulation in CHina or Indonesia. Those arn't white kids that he doesn't want to share the Earth's resources with. Protectionists are the same way. Their attitude towards Mexican immigrants is no different than the people in Boston who painted "Irish need not apply" signs.

[Eala]

The author is a real fave over at Smirking Chimp. That makes him a bonafide Bush-hater with no credibility. Along with others who post his dogdoo.

LOL!!

Yet... I am seeing an interesting variant of this up close. My employer, located in one of the more expensive high-tech locales in the country, was recently bought by a large international corporation.

Our production facility will soon move to a much less expensive locale where they already have a manufacturing facility. (Apparently many staff have been given an opportunity to move -- I've heard amazement at the housing one can buy for the money there.)

Yet... this international corporation is not only not outsourcing R&D, it's consolidating it here. Which means relocating R&D groups from lower-cost-of-living locales to this expensive locale. (And those people, looking at housing prices here, are putting up a fuss.)

Why locate R&D here? A large pool of talent is available locally. Without the difficulties inherent in having the staff in distant lands (and those difficulties do exist -- for years I've worked closely with a small Boston outfit with isolated staff in Canada and a team in Moscow).

Perhaps the out-sourcing difficulties don't scale; they're large on a small scale, small on a large scale. But that's a story the doomsayers aren't going to tell you.

[William Terrell]

There seems to be this idea among us conservatives that capitalism has no downside, that it's the tip of the mountain only, suspended in air with no base and no valleys. By it's nature, capitalism can not become corrupt nor can those who operate within a capitalistic system become corrupt, abusive or destructive.

But greed and power corrupts, and those that benefit from a capitalist economy are just as susceptible to those influences as those who work within any other system.

We had better recognize that or the serpent is liable to sneak up on us.

[.cnI redruM]

It depends upon where the Mickey D's is. If you're talking a San Francisco Big Mac, the 75% figure is a low estimate. If you're talking a Killeen, Texas Big Mac, recalculate your math.

The American economy is vastly better shape than it was in 1973, 1933, 1903 or just about any other decade's year ending in a 3 with the exceptions of 1953, 1963 and 1993.

As Mark Twain once remarked when he was told that someone pronounced him dead, "The stories of my demise are greatly exaggerated. Stop listening to The Howard Dean Team. The sky really isn't falling.

[.cnI redruM]

Donald,

I regret that you lost your job. I've lost a job before and at the time, was a broken man (not to mention a broke one). What hasn't been sent abroad is your set of skills and your brain power.

It's up to you to make sure your self-worth doesn't get shipped abroad also. I ended up vastly better off once I got over being sacked. In fact I'm quite lucky I don't work the SOBs any more.

[OrangeDaisy]

Everybody who needs a job should head to Nashville. I know an insurance company who can't hire salesmen fast enough to keep up with their expansion plans. I know someone who designs and installs whirlpool tubs, & cultured marble countertops who says he can't find installers. Our restuarants never have enough waiters. These jobs all pay well if you're willing to work hard. I've decided Americans don't want to work for a living anymore. The professionals who have lost their jobs are going to have to figure out a way to make their money in healthcare or home construction/remodeling. This is where the jobs will be as we baby boomers age.

[InterceptPoint]

People need to make stuff in order to sell stuff in order to have money to buy stuff. If folks don't make stuff, there's nothing to sell, hence, no money, and regardless of how cheap any item imported may be, folks won't be able to buy it.

Of course.

But you can't just make stuff that the Chinese can make cheaper. You just can't. That's life. You have to make stuff that the Chinese can't make at all. Like Intel P4 microprocessor designs, Windows Operating Systems, movies with Catherine Zeta-Jones, skycrapers in New York, whatever comes after the Boeing 747, California wine, L.A. Freeways ... We need more of all of these things. Let's get to work.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Is Karl Marx's quote on free trade relevant today?