On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >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.
Yes, but doesn't that also entirely occlude the story of whether jobs are moving from the rest of the world to China? If the Chinese private export sector grew by 20 million jobs, and the Chinese state sector fell by 25 million jobs, China could still be said to be importing those 20 million jobs from overseas if they aren't performing the functions the state sector did. I'm not sure that the closing of state sector jobs is a story of productivity gain even if that's the result. That sector is supposed to have been value-destroying for a long time. GDP gain elsewhere -- and employment opportunities elsewhere -- may be providing the opportunity to close factories that on purely economic grounds would have been closed long ago and have only been kept open on social peace grounds.
My point is that if these two trends are going in opposite directions, it is quite possible that the fall in Chinese manufacturing is something that will be reversed in the future. And that while, in the long run, productivity will cut down on gross manufacturing employment, that long run may still be a long way off in China, which may yet be travelling in the opposite direction.
I'm not saying I want this to be true. I'd rather it weren't. But I don't see how this data resolves it.
Michael