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Book
Report:
The Race to the Bottom,
Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking U.
S. Labor Standards
The Race to the Bottom,
Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking U.
S. Labor Standards
Alan Tonelson
Perseus Books of Westview Press;
Boulder Colorado, 2000.
A suggested by its title,
this book is about the efforts of giant international corporations to
replace American workers by cheap foreign labor. This process involves
moving factories to the world’s underdeveloped countries.
In essence, this is about
exporting American jobs out of existence. The book speaks of employers
using treaties such as the North American Free Trade agreement (NAFTA) and
international alliances such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) to cut
labor costs and import cheap goods.
The recent confrontations
with the WTO in Seattle were centered on this issue. Those protesting at
the convention of that organization were, according to this author,
fighting against high corporate profits, the exploitation of unorganized
third world labor, and the enactment of laws intended to allow cheaply
made foreign goods into the American marketplace. According to the author,
this intervention of American business into foreign production areas is
called globalism. He notes that President Clinton once said that
“Globalization is the central reality of our times.”
He adds that the American
media have done their best to downplay the importance of globalism and to
conceal the facts about it from the American People. He says they do not
mention the number of jobs shipped overseas or what American products are
undersold out of existence. Nor do they say anything about the very low
wages paid to foreigners who do what was at one time American work.
Violations of human rights
are also ignored. This includes exceptionally long hours, degradation of
the working environment and the disregard of easily correctable health
hazards. Worst of all is the exploitation of the millions of children who
are forced to work at ages five to fourteen.
He notes that this affects
American workers in sometimes less than obvious ways: wages become
stagnant, benefits are surreptitiously lost and layoffs are more frequent.
He follows up by saying
that the out sourcing of American labor to places such as China, India,
Bangladesh, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico has progressively become more
important. Such has caused the disintegration of some American labor
unions, and this is confirmed by statistics. For instance, in 1979 some
24% of our labor force was unionized. Now the figure is about 13.9%
Nor do opportunities to
work at near slave wages help the people abroad. Overpopulation and under
development have combined to undermine employment opportunities in third
world countries. The rate of unemployment in Latin America is 9.5%, in
India it is 22.5% and it reaches as much as 40% in Indonesia.
This has brought forth
what the author calls the race to the bottom. In recent years, 83% of
Mexican workers have seen a decline in real wages. Wages, adjusted for
inflation, have gone down 5.4% in China, 6% in the Philippines and 66.5%
in Indonesia.
President Clinton summed
up the situation very well in a recent speech to an AFL-CIO convention.
“Six billion people,” he
said, “Live on the face of the earth; half of these live on two dollars
a day and 1.3 billion on a dollar a day or less.”
The author concludes this
well written book by saying the trend is accelerating downwards, and by
ignoring this fact our country is losing control over its economic fate.
Fred Berg
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