nathan wrote:
>So a basic starting question is whether the slave-labor like conditions
>in China is a threat to US jobs and to wage levels of working class
>folks here.
--nathan, could you explain this, do you mean highly exploitative? if -so, how so different from what we see in, say, Indonesia or Honduras?
In Indonesia today, at least, you can advocate to form a union without being thrown in jail. In China, being an independent union leader is a direct ticket to jail. The right to strike is non-existent, which defines slave labor in my mind.
Rights in Honduras are pretty bad, but I think China's conditions in relation to the right to organize are near the bottom possible.
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>Why Bad Labor Conditions Distort Markets: And if you believe in letting
>the "market" set wages (however problematic that idea is), it is not
>markets, but secret police and gulags for labor union leaders that are
>keeping wages down.
--I'd have thougt the primary cause was saturated labor markets in some --sectors and, most critically, massive layoffs in the state sector, --creating an even larger mass army of reserve labor. I grant there --don't exist free unions in China, but it's a stretch to argue that that --is the main cause of low wages in China. Indonesia has 'free unions', --yet its workers have similarly experienced declining wages in many --sectors as well, especially against inflation and devaluations in --currency.
Yes, the mass layoffs obviously play a role, maybe a large role, but the fact that many Chinese workers have tried to engage in job actions, only to be crushed by the government, shows that the reserve army of the unemployed is not by itself enough to cow all labor resistance.
But all labor activists demand is that China stop violating the ILO as a condition of trade-- no one argues that unemployment by itself is an unfair trade advantage for a country.
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>But until that point, trade with China is a cancer on global labor
>conditions, growing by the day and driving all workers in a race to the
>bottom, as US employers demand that US workers compete with slave labor
>or lose their jobs.
--this is more rhetoric than serious analysis I"m afraid.
Why? As if rhetoric is in short supply among many folks-- the issue is whether 90 million Chinese workers producing for the US market without basic labor rights is a threat to labor standards in the United States. If it is, then that statement is not rhetoric but description of reality.
China is a socialist nightmare-- a fascist regime running a nation on behalf of wealthy capitalists, breaking any attempt by workers to organize to raise their wages, leaving tens of millions unemployed with the most threadbare welfare state imaginable.
Nathan