Trading Away Our Future

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Trading Away Our Future
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor

February 25, 2004

"Leaning Left"

James Hall America's greatest export these days isn't cars or computers or clothes. It's jobs, good jobs that any American would be proud to have--high-tech, creative, knowledge-based jobs of the kind we urge our children to educate themselves for. And in the name of free trade and the global economy, our 'American' corporations can't wait to give these jobs, our future, away to others.

Today the beleaguered American worker is assaulted from all sides. Good-paying, high-tech jobs are going overseas to countries where educated workers will work for half the wages and salaries. Mid-level, secretarial and administrative work is farmed out to English-speaking nations like India and the Philippines. And the jobs remaining here, mostly lower-paying service works, are increasingly given to illegal alien workers or immigrants working for cheap wages. Add to this the increasing cost of medical care slowly squeezing wages and salaries and pensions for the few decent jobs remaining and the situation is grim, indeed.

The high standard of living that many Americans grew up with is endangered by this trend. Once hard-working Americans could count on lifetime employment, good wages and salaries, excellent medical care and a solid retirement pension. Today's American workers can't count on any of these things.

It shouldn't be this way. Americans are the hardest working people in the world-annual surveys show Americans working longer and harder and taking less time off than workers elsewhere. Productivity among American workers is at an all time high. Corporations should be clamoring for more American workers to do their work.

The culprit is a global economy without fair standards. It's not enough to be productive and hardworking when you are competing against the desperately poor, and in some cases, against their children. It's not enough to be productive when educated, intelligent workers in another country will work for half the cost, or when foreign governments offer tax incentives to relocate jobs overseas. It's not enough to be productive when plants can be built in nations that ignore their workers' health and safety, or where environmental standards are non-existent.

No matter how educated and productive autoworkers are in Detroit, they can't compete with Maquiladoras in Mexico, where workers will work for $1.50 an hour and live in the company's leftover packing crates adjacent to creeks with running sewage and pollutants.

When the jobs lost to this kind of foreign 'competition' were relatively menial-textile and assembly plant jobs-most Americans shrugged their shoulders and told their children to go to school for better jobs. But now the better jobs are going, too.

Bit the risks to Americans aren't just in the loss of good, creative jobs. The technologies that made America paramount among nations are being exported along with these technology jobs. American intellectual property and American skills will become the property of low-wage economies like India and China and high-tech oases like Singapore and Taiwan.

Free market advocates have long held that free trade makes America stronger. But is this true when the so-called 'competition' occurs on a tilted playing field? Is it really competition when foreign nations give tax incentives to corporations to relocate, keep their currencies artificially low to keep the price of manufactures low, ban collective bargaining for their workers, and ignore fair labor and environmental standards? Is the market "free" when the national policies of foreign nations encourage exports and discourage American imports, as India does? Or when foreign nations ignore intellectual property laws and permit their national industries to counterfeit American goods like China does?

Bedazzled by corporate lobbyists and awash in corporate donations, our politicians in Washington seem unwilling to do anything to stop this bleeding of American technology and jobs. It's up to us to remind them that America's strength lies in her people, not in the corporate profits of companies that no longer deserve to call themselves "American."

If America plays by the rules of free trade, and other nations do not, the game is rigged, and the result is the end of American jobs, American technology, and America's future. ***

James Hall
Orlando, FL USA

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files