Nathan Newman wrote:
Many business and professional services are related to
>manufacturing jobs-- that is who is being serviced in many cases. If you
>lose big manufacturing firms or have to scale back, you also cut back on
>janitors, accountants, design services, and all the other folks who make
>firms work.
-So why is retail shrinking, with all those Chinese goods to sell?
Overbuilding in the previous period is one answer, and retail is going through a structural shakeout, partly due to Wal-Mart, partly due to the Internet, that is only partially related to the recession. No one is arguing that trade is the only issue that effects jobs, just that trade is a significant factor in both manufacturing and services related to manufacturing.
>Design, accountancy, and other services are necessary even if the
>dirty work is done halfway around the world.
But it's often easier to locate those services closer to the worksite-- especially the lower-level services, from janitorial to food delivery jobs, that are completely integrated into the core manufacturing jobs. Send manufacturing jobs to a location and many of the services will follow.
>And you're not
>responding to the point that Chinese imports have largely replaced
>imports from elsewhere in Asia, so there should be no difference in
>the secondary effects.
Since those jobs are moving because China often pays even lower wages with worse labor conditions, then the effects on US workers will still be worse, both in accellerated jobs losses and greater threats by management to move jobs unless wages and benefits are slashed. The effects on workers from low labor standards in China are not just from actual job losses but from the downward wage pressure and the concessions US employers can extract based on the threat of exit. So the lower the wages and higher the relative productivity to those wages are in China, the more downward wage pressure for US workers.
>The import share of GDP is lower today than it was in 2000 - 14.1% in
>the last quarter of 2003, vs. 14.6% in the first quarter of 2000.
>Service imports (which would include "offshored" services) are up 0.1
>point, from 2.3% to 2.4%, while goods are off 0.5 point, fom 12.2% to
>11.7%. You'd have a hard time making the case that an import surge is
>at the root of our employment problem in light of these numbers.
The whole point of my original post is that I don't think these percentage of GDP measures are enough, given the low dollar amounts paid to Chinese workers. If jobs are shifting from other countries, as you note, to China, the same or even lower amount of imports could represent a surge in total hours of labor represented by those imports, and much greater pressure on job losses and downward wage pressure.
>What is it with the recurrent urge to blame Asians for our economic
>problems? In the 1980s, it was Japan; now it's China and India. Why
>the aversion to looking at our own structural problems?
"Blame Asians"? Calling for the end of slave labor and imprisonment of union activists in China is not "blaming asians"; it's blaming US capitalists who collaborate with dictators in China to oppress the Chinese people and hurt US workers.
What I don't get is the kneejerk defense of one of the most reprehensible regimes in global history, one that is mixing the worst policies of capitalist economic oppression with Stalinist political repression.
I spend 99% of my time bashing the domestic leadership of the United States for screwing US workers, but the minute you dare to mention that Chinese capitalists and their political leadership, in close association with US capitalists and the US government, are also fucking the working class, suddenly it is implied that you are some kind of xenophobe or racist. I really resent that crap.
I am all for Chinese workers being better off economically. I am for greater trade in areas where the US is unfairly shutting out exports, especially in the agricultural area, where rural workers globally would benefit most. But I think it takes massive intellectual gyrations by left intellectuals to pretend that the massive forced poverty of hundreds of millions of Chinese workers by the hands of a dictatorship is not a signficant factor in the global economy and the downward pressure are wages in the US and, significantly, in many nations like Indonesia and Mexico that had been struggling to improve both their labor conditions and standards of living, but now face immisseration due to job shifts globally.
Nathan