here's an interesting article from the washington post that has a subtext of your point about Bush being a profit protectionist.
China's Workers -- and Ours
By Harold Meyerson
Until 10 a.m. yesterday, U.S. trade law belonged to big business. Corporations routinely petitioned our government to threaten other countries with sanctions if their products were being knocked off or undersold by foreign manufacturers with state subsidies, and our government frequently complied. The solicitude the Bush White House and its predecessors showed for shareholders, however, was nowhere in evidence for workers. Profits depressed by unfair trade practices were an official object of concern; wages and employment levels depressed by unfair trade practices were none of the government's business.
This double standard was the heart of modern trade policy. Yesterday morning, that began to change. For the first time ever, the AFL-CIO filed the kind of unfair-trade petition that corporations commonly file, alleging that China's repression of workers' rights has displaced at minimum 727,000 U.S. jobs, and calling on the president to threaten China with tariffs until it stops artificially lowering its workers' wages.
The idea that our trade statutes protect American workers from competition with repressed workforces overseas will surprise just about everybody, but in fact, these laws were enacted by Congress in the 1980s and signed by Ronald Reagan. For the past 15 years, unions have taken no action under the laws, because the U.S. job losses were hard to quantify.
Critics will doubtless call the AFL-CIO "protectionist" for filing this petition. And if it's protectionist to demand that millions of Chinese women have the right to leave their jobs and apply for better ones, or to unionize their workplace or be allowed at least one day off a year, if it's protectionist to demand that U.S. workers not lose their jobs because they cannot work as cheaply as these repressed Chinese workers, then the AFL-CIO should absolutely plead guilty. What I'd like to hear from the critics -- and from George W. Bush -- is why they're protecting the deal between U.S. corporations and China's neo-Stalinist state to extract profits for them both at the expense of tens of millions of desperate young women.
washingtonpost.com |
