The question of labour standards was raised by Lancashire textile industry, when Indian textile industry began to emerge and compete with the former in the Indian domestic markets. No wonder the issue of labour standards has been raised, when the question of access to the developed country markets is at stake.
I am not sure if low wages by themselves are pertinent to the debate about labour standards. I think it's about low wage ratesdue to prison labour, slave labour, child labour, lack of collective bargaining rights, discrimination at work place etc.,which confer an advantage unacceptable to contemporary capitalism.
Ulhas
----- Original Message ----- From: Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2000 7:47 PM Subject: Re: US denies Cambodia full quota of garment imports
> Thank you for this report, Ulhas.
>
> One senses that those rewarded the biggest quotas are rewarded to those
> who have their production or marketing organized to some great extent by
US
> transnational corporations--most 'trade' seems to be intrafirm trade.
> Greider did recently make the point that the world trading system is not
> organized freely but made up of such deals. Given the class nature of the
> US state, one can infer that the bans or tarriffs or low quotas it will
> actually impose on 'third world' imports--called for by Palley, EPI,
> etc--will tend be on those produced and marketed outside the influence of
> US companies as a way of aiding the centralisation and concentration of US
> capital in the American market and on the world stage. This means ability
> to export to the US market will not be determined in a rational way by
> human need or 'fairly' but by the valorization requirements of the already
> concentrated and centralised capital in the US.
>
> These outsiders will simply be consigned to suppliers of last resort to
> the US market.. Once we move beyond the utopian visions of these
> reformers--based on a naive state fetishism--we obviously should not
expect
> anything else. It is rather fantastic to think the US state would or
could
> protect US labor instead of invoking the name of US labor when
> consolidating the dominance of US corporations. Prasidh is thus probably
> incorrect to think the low quotas are due to the pressure of US unions,
> instead of US business which probably is not that well represented among
> the foreign investors and marketers in Cambodia.The garment exports will
> simply come from such other low wage country. If Cambodian garment
> production and marketing were more deeply interpenetrated with US capital,
> one can expect that the quota would have been bigger. Import quotas,
> arbitrarily applied, are probably best understood as a political mechanism
> for the centralisation of imperialist capital on a world scale rather than
> a labor protection mechanism.
>
> Well that's my highly speculative take with which Michael P and others
will
> probably righthly take issue.
>
> Yours, Rakesh
>