>On Fri, 5 Mar 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> >Read this forum with Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Doug Henwood and Jeff
>> >Madrick, from the March 22, 2004 issue of The Nation.
>> >
>> >Toward a Progressive View on Outsourcing:
>> >http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040322&c=1&s=cavanagh
>
>I liked your piece a lot. You always have the clearest figures.
The Nation editors were worried there were too many numbers. I was urged to compress them "severely." I compressed them modestly.
>I have a couple question about manufacturing. You mention that
>manufacturing has lost 3.3 million jobs in the last 6 years, more than it
>did during the much more heralded jobs-going-overseas trend of the early
>80s. Is it possible that this is the real offshoring story?
Yes and no, because as I say in the piece (and in the last LBO), manufacturing employment has been declining globally, even in China. What I didn't have room to say is that one interesting exception is Canada, a high-wage country tightly integrated with the U.S., where factory jobs rose by over 20% in the late 1990s.
>My second question had to do with your suggestion that most of the layoffs
>in manufacturing during the last 6 years had to do with increases in
>productivity in manufacturing.
Not exactly - that was an explanation for the downtrend in factory employment in China. The decline in China is mostly the result of the closure of state-owned enterprises, which were technologically backward and overstaffed by modern standards. The replacement of those older factories with newer ones has given an enormous boost to productivity in China, though you can be sure the gains aren't being claimed by the working class.
> I thought you didn't buy that there was
>big increases in productivity in manufacturing outside computers over the
>last 6 years?
I was referring to the long-term trend, which goes back a century or two.
Doug