Can we solve both problems at once?
Technology transfer threatens to worsen the first while reforming the latter, so I don't know if the contradiction is mine or inherent in the nature of things. There just seems to me some tradeoff here. Even if workers are 'unionized' in the contracted out plants, it seems quite probable that capital will nonetheless enjoy a higher rate of exploitation due to the the lower value of labor power abroad.
However, I would never have issued a categorical statement against the transfer of any production process within advanced industries controlled by the imperialist countries to third world countries. Such opposition to tech transfer or local content laws seems quite ridiculous since it is pursued by the US state which has deployed no few threats of protection to force FDI into many of its right to work states.
And here the problem is even more urgent. There must be some transfer if whole nations are to free themselves from bad, if not worsening, terms of trade. In the case of new 'internationalist' labor leaders, what we have is a strategy to maintain an exploitative world division of labor, not the emancipation of labor from capital.
It is also becoming clear that with the collapse of Keynesianism, labor now seeks to secure itself through the domination of the world market via a stranglehold on key industries through this very illiberal tech transfer policy and threat of social protection on countries that do not abide by it.
I think American labor's entry into foreign trade politics with the Seattle protests is great cause for alarm.
The direction these new "internationalists" have us going in seems quite negative. It is important that criticism of Mazur, Sweeney, etc. begin now.
Yours, Rakesh