[Jewelry making - Article 00200] - Re: [Orchid] Handmade vs mass-produced

[Christine Denayer]

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    Ken, I read your message. A soap box is a nice thing and surely
    everyone is entitled to this opinion, still, the truth is that no one
    really knows how many jobs flee the U.S.A. nor any other
    industrialized country for that part as a consequence of a process
    which is wrongly called 'globalization' nowadays - I am perhaps
    permitted to refer to the seminal work about this done by my good
    friend Erik Swyngedouw from the University of Oxford - look it up on
    the net, many of his articles can be found. Let me answer a couple of
    points in short. 1. The thesis that strong unions in the USA managed
    to get wages up to such a point that they became a competitive
    disavantage is untrue. It is historically incorrect in the long term
    - and besides the unions have been on the defensive since Reagan, if
    not earlier. But even if trade unions would have succeeded in getting
    the wages up - as indeed happened in most countries of Western Europe
    - then the relationship you take as a fact is still wrong, because
    another relationship interferes, namely the one between the
    percentage of unionized workers in a country - or sector - and the
    productivity in that sector, and it has been proven over and over
    again that this relationship is positive. This is for example the
    case in Belgium - but also in Germany, in France, in Holland, in
    Italy ... In each of these countries the percentage of unionized
    workers is far higher than in the USA. The welfare state is far more
    developed as is the health insurance, which is universal. While all
    of this costs indeed a lot of money, the balance of it is positive
    for the country as a whole - I know from experience that this is
    extremely difficult for some Americans to understand, because it
    sounds completely counterintuitive at first sight and goes against
    what you hear all day, everyday - believe me, I know, I have been
    living in the USA for 2 years. Why is it positive? Because the
    benign effects of social mobility translate themselves in a very high
    productivity and in an educated and innovative oriented labor force.
    Only one example, but an important one: university education in
    Belgium is almost free, in other words, the tax payers pay for
    education. As a result, many people can study and as a result of this
    they can get a job which pays well, generating in turn higher taxes
    than if they would not have been able to get an education. Yes, taxes
    are high - so high that if you were right, the disavantage to our
    economies would be obvious - still the macroeconomic effects are not
    negative but positive.There is one other little detail: reckoning in
    real terms, real incomes have not gone up in the USA at all, they
    have gone *down* for almost two decades by now for the lower as well
    as for the lower middle classes - the statistics from the Dept. of
    Labor will teach you this - they are easy to find on the net as well.
    I think that this proves the wrongness of your point sufficiently. So
    is the USA losing jobs as a result of NAFTA? Yes. Some Americans,
    and we don't know how many, lost - and lose - their job because of
    this agreement. The most basic thing to understand about all of this
    is that this agreement - and many others, NAFTA only basically being
    a symptom - would never been have negotiated if some Americans - we
    are talking about the USA here - did not get *much* better of it. The
    clearest indicator for all of this is the old parameter of Theil.
    This parameter construes a relationship between the evolution of the
    wages in a country. If the parameter is low then the wages evolve in
    such a way that rises in wages are comparable to each other. If the
    parameter is high then there is a discrepancy between the rises in
    wages of the lower classes, the middle classes, the higher classes
    and the top of the wage pyramid. Well now, the parameter of Theil
    proves that there is a tremendous discrepancy between the evolution
    of the wages in the USA. Some people lose their job, while others
    work and see their real income decrease, while other ones get rich
    like never before - you can find this information on the website of
    the Dept. of Labor also - besides, I can send them to you when I get
    back home. Now, you tell me, suppose I want to buy a car, why would I
    buy a Ford or a Chrysler or a Chevy? And, indeed, why would you? You
    won't keep jobs in the USA by doing so, because the economic pull is
    not lead by price - consumption - at all, but almost solely by the
    cost of labor. This problem, in fact, and this the most basic thing
    to say about it, cannot be solved by any economic rationality or
    economic behavior, it is a political problem and, as such, has be
    addressed *politically* and *globally*. Weird as it may sound, the
    very best the American worker - and the honest American citizen - can
    do is to make common cause with the worker in India and in Mexico in
    Eastern Europe and so on. If there are no adequate institutions for
    doing so, let's make such instutions or let's transform existing
    ones. I am completely and absolutely sure that nothing else will work
    - protectionism will not work - who do you think you will 'protect'
    ? - curtailing the unions will not work, organizing trade wars will
    not work, making the rich richer will obviously not work either, but
    decreasing the incentive to delocalize by all sorts of ways will
    work. History - if there still will be one - will prove this point.
    Best, Will 


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