>It might or, evidently, might not, but what we're
>interested in is employment and living standards.
>Cuz we're a bunch o' bolsheviki, so to speak.
>
>In the latter regard, the past two years have
>been exceptional and if that sort of thing continued
>the trade issue would wither away. But it's a little
>premature to attribute the correlates of 3.9%
>unemployment to recent trade liberalization.
>By contrast, the withering of manufacturing
>and the flight of manufacturing jobs is a
>long-standing pattern.
I.e, one that predates NAFTA - by decades. Just ask the millworkers of Lowell, or the RCA workers of Camden.
I've got the same Bolshie interest you do. And employment and real earnings are up - employment since 1992, earnings since 1995. So it's more than two years. I'm not arguing that trade liberalization caused it, but it's happened along with - despite? - trade liberalization.
I think people focus too much on manufacturing itself, and not enough on the workers. Manufacturing work is dangerous, dirty, and often mind-numbing. Shouldn't the focus of agitation be high wages, good benefits, and interesting work, and not the sector?
Doug