>
>What's your position on these American workers who might lose their
>jobs to "foreign competition"? Are they right or wrong to be worried?
>Is their union right or wrong to try to defend them? What stance
>should the workers and their union adopt?
>
>Doug
I don't get the focus on foreign competition. Jobs can be lost to domestic or foreign competition. If high cost plants are shut down in downturns only to be set up in cheaper wage zones elsewhere, then one could demand that prohibitively high severance pay for job loss due to plant relocation in particular be guaranteed by contract? At any rate, I think unions should be worried, should try to defend already employed higher wage workers, should try to prevent capital flight to cheaper workers in foreign or domestically outsourced plants. Now if say Egypt were to buy several jets from Boeing, I do think some of them should be built there with much local labor and content in order to ease the transfer of technology across national boundaries. Another thing: since I don't think that high wages, which are indeed good in themselves, will do much to prevent the onset of crisis conditions the effective cause of which I don't take to be underconsumption or overexploitation, the defense of high wages cannot be enough in the long run to ameliorate real working class misery.
Yours, Rakesh