protection

[Doug Henwood]

[ok, address changed, should be no more of these - apropos of this, 
there's a front-page story in the Labor Party paper about a plant 
closing, filled with mournful iconography  - it's right to mourn the 
loss of high wages and decent benefits, but why get all sentimental 
about factory work itself? it's often dirty, dangerous, and dull]

Date: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 20:26:57 -0700
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
From: Brad DeLong <jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu>


>Max Sawicky wrote:
>
>>We have to recognize that supporting enviro measures that
>>destroy jobs and provide a "just transition" is asking to
>>get kicked in the teeth.
>
>Drilling in Alaska is about new jobs, not destroying old ones. And
>just because transitional assistance has sucked in the past doesn't
>mean that fighting for the real thing isn't a good idea.
>
>Protect the worker not the job, I say.
>
>Doug

Ah. But you fail to recognize how small, how very small your (and my)
faction on this issue is:

... protectionist Republicans don't like TAA or other forms of
"transition assistance" because they aid the workers and not the
bosses, and thus diminish the bosses' ability to hide behind the
workers in their quest for economic rents.

... free-trade Republicans don't like TAA or other forms of
"transition assistance" because it violates the Randian moral
imperative that what the market dictates must be obeyed, and that
gains and losses should remain wherever the market decrees that they
lie.

... model builders don't like TAA or other forms of "transition
assistance" because they distort incentives: employment will be too
high in declining sectors where comparative advantage is being lost
if people can look forward to TAA. (Appealing to myopia as a
justification for TAA only makes it worse: if workers look only at
current and not at future earnings too many look for jobs in
declining sectors, and so you want to tax--not subsidize--industries
where comparative advantage is being lost.)

...union leaders say that they "don't want burial insurance"--and
don't want the representatives and senators who they can influence to
support it. From their perspective, TAA is almost as bad as nothing
at all.

So all this Reichian protect-the-worker lifelong-learning
public-education education-and-training for a dynamic new economy
where people switch careers several times over a lifetime--the
support base for these kinds of policies are confined to New
Democrats, Bleeding-Heart (or is that "Bleating Heart"?) Liberals,
and other Rootless Cosmopolites.


:-)

Brad DeLong