[lbo-talk] Does Trade With China Matter?

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Wed Mar 24 11:51:34 PST 2004


Nathan Newman wrote:


>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.
>
>That is not acceptable and must end.

How?

The BW article that Michael Pollak pointed to addresses a lot of the points you make, Nathan - including the fact that a lot of Chinese exports are substituting for exports elsewhere in East Asia. And your estimate of 90m manufacturing workers in China supplying the U.S. market implies that some 90% of all Chinese factory workers are serving the U.S. market alone, which seems far-fetched.

Your analysis overlooks the failure of the U.S. to produce new service jobs. Outside health care, private services are still 1.3 million jobs below the pre-recession peak. Retail is off, as are professional and business services and even temp work. Had private services been producing new jobs at the same rate it averaged between 1948 and 2000, employment would be over 8 million above where it is now - and probably less than 500,000 service jobs have been "offshored." Manufacturing has been shrinking rapidly over the last few years, but it also shrank (though much less dramatically) in the 1980s and 1990s. For the service sector to be barely growing is unprecedented.

Doug



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