Jobs

Over the last several election cycles the public has been treated to an ongoing debate within the political arena on the subject of employment, We need more jobs! is often their hollow battle cry. Sometimes the answer is so obviously clear and simple it is easily overlooked in the interest of debating moot points.

Here’s an interesting statistic: It has been a little over 16 years since Congress passed the NAFTA agreement, and since that time, nearly 29 million jobs have been lost or relocated outside of the United States. (This assessment is based on a new report from Global Economic Intersection’s (GEI) study on jobs and NAFTA since 1992.)

NAFTA is a free trade and investment agreement that provided investors with a unique set of guarantees designed to stimulate foreign direct investment and the movement of factories within the hemisphere, especially from the United States to Canada and Mexico. Furthermore, no protections were contained in the core of the agreement to maintain labor or environmental standards. As a result, NAFTA tilted the economic playing field in favor of investors, and against workers and the environment, resulting in a hemispheric “race to the bottom” in wages and environmental quality.

When the North American Free Trade Agreement was first signed in 1994, proponents said it would eventually create jobs for the U.S. economy.

17 years later, a new report estimates, the American worker only has hundreds of thousands of job losses to show for it.

According to a report by Economic Policy Institute economist Robert Scott, entitled “Heading South: U.S.-Mexico trade and job displacement after NAFTA,” an estimated 682,900 U.S. jobs have been “lost or displaced” because of the agreement and the resulting trade deficit.

The EPI’s calculation of 682,900 jobs lost to NAFTA takes into account jobs created as a result, too. Last year, for example, U.S. exports to Mexico supported 791,900 jobs. It’s just that those jobs created pale in comparison to the 1.47 million U.S. jobs that would be necessary without the imports resulting from NAFTA, the report found.

And that’s just the impact of one country, Mexico on the U.S. economy. Think now of Asia.

In addition to granting China a Most Favored Nation trading status, the U.S. entered into a similar trade agreement with South Korea in March of 2012, called U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA). KORUS, like NAFTA, could similarly displace American jobs, EPI warns. According to a new study by Economic Policy Institute senior economist, Robert Scott, some 159,000 jobs in the U.S. will be lost in the first 7 years after the implementation of KORUS FTA. Of particular note, the KORUS FTA will negatively impact the U.S. based auto and auto parts manufacturing sectors.

Scott further noted that with the Columbia Free Trade Agreement recently revived for consideration by the Obama administration, some 60,000 jobs in the U.S. could be displaced.

According to a new study by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) in the past 10 years more than 6 million manufacturing jobs have been lost and more than 57,000 factories have closed in the U.S.

While our new Nero fiddles neo-Rome is aflame.

Since October of 2000, the United States has lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs while from 1999 to 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30% to 10.0 million new jobs overseas. The U.S. has lost 32% of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
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Has U.S. manufacturing declined because its companies are not competitive? Hardly. American companies are among the most efficient in the world. The nation’s steel industry, for instance, produces 1 ton of steel using two man-hours. A comparable ton of steel in China is produced with 12 man-hours, and Chinese companies produce three times the amount of carbon emissions per ton of steel. The same kinds of comparisons are true for other industries.

But American companies have difficulty competing against foreign countries that undervalue their currencies, pay health care for their workers; provide subsidies for energy, land, buildings, and equipment; grant tax holidays and rebates and provide zero-interest financing; pay their workers poverty wages that would be illegal in the United States, and don’t enforce safety or environmental regulations.

You might want to read Winwood Reade’s 1872 volume The Martyrdom of Man, in which he chronicled the economy of ancient Rome: “By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.”

Today, America’s biggest export via ocean container is waste paper — our version of dung. The largest U.S. exporter via ocean container in 2007 was not even an American company, but Chinese: American Chung Nam, which exported 211,300 containers of waste paper to its Chinese sister company, Nine Dragons Paper. By comparison, Wal-Mart imported 720,000 containers of sophisticated manufactured products from overseas factories into the United States, followed by Target (435,000 containers), Home Depot (365,300 containers), and Sears, which owns K-Mart (248,600 containers). Our own Ostia Road.

Here’s something you might want to think about. In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero. Nada. Not a single one. Zip.

Or how about this statistic: The Census Bureau says 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty, which is the highest number of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.

The ITIF report rejected the notion that manufacturing is “old economy” and should be discarded in favor of a service economy. In fact, the study argued that economic growth isn’t sustainable without growth in manufacturing. It called for a carefully planned combination of trade protections and investments (especially for “new economy” sectors) as part of a joint effort of public and private entities to rebuild the U.S. manufacturing sector.

The United States is rapidly becoming the very first “post-industrial” nation on the globe. All great economic empires eventually become fat and lazy and squander the great wealth that their forefathers have left them, but the pace at which America is accomplishing this is absolutely amazing. It was America, remember that was at the forefront of the industrial revolution.

Any great nation throughout history has been great at making things. So if the United States continues to allow its manufacturing base to erode at a staggering pace how in the world can the U.S. continue to consider itself to be a great nation? We have created the biggest debt bubble in the history of the world in an effort to maintain a very high standard of living, but the current state of affairs is not anywhere close to sustainable.
Every single month America goes into more debt and every single month America gets poorer.

So what happens when the debt bubble pops?

The deindustrialization of the United States should be a top concern for every man, woman and child in the country. But sadly, most Americans do not have any idea what is going on around them.

Do we want jobs? Bring our manufacturing base back to the United States.