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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2004Workshop TalksChasing jobs awayby Htun Lin Bush’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers recently said that American jobs going offshore to other countries is “a good thing for the economy.” He had an accurate point in his inverted world: Capitalists have been enjoying windfall profits through ever-increasing productivity as well as moving jobs offshore while jobs continue to be lost in the other world where we workers live. Our labor leaders have allowed thousands of Wal-Mart stores to open and not a single store in the U.S. is even unionized. A few years ago even some unionized HMOs urged union leaders to organize the cut-throat HMOs which remained non-unionized. Safeway has similarly complained that Wal-Mart is a killer competitor because it is non-unionized. That’s why all the grocery chains have united to bargain with the union as a bloc, while our unions continue to be oblivious to the importance of uniting in solidarity for this kind of class warfare. James Hoffa Jr. recently backstabbed striking grocery workers when the Teamsters withdrew picket support at a critical moment. It figures that President Sweeney of the AFL-CIO and Hoffa of the Teamsters have now endorsed John Kerry. They waited to find out who the likely winner would be. They endorsed a Democratic candidate who didn’t stand up to Bush on the invasion of Iraq or on the USA PATRIOT Act, and didn’t stand up against unfair trade agreements like NAFTA. Many of us can’t remember the last time we’ve seen our union leaders on the shop floor between contracts or between elections. While they were sleeping, corporate America went off shore. Looking for the cheapest labor available around the globe is something capitalists have been doing since its rosy dawn. As the capitalist speeds up workers in order to maximize his extraction of surplus labor, the more he faces the decline in the rate of profit. SEEKING CHEAP LABOR By forcing less workers to produce more in less time, the capitalist is eliminating the source of capitalist value: living labor. His temporary solution is to go in search of cheaper labor elsewhere. Otherwise capitalism will die. Alienated labor is the source of the fundamental estrangement between thought and reality under capitalism. That estrangement occurs not only in the economic sphere but also in all spheres of thought and in all aspects of our lives. For us workers, the worst violation of all is the current onslaught by corporate America to decouple workers from workers’ health benefits. It is the worst kind of inversion of thought and reality to claim that the well being of workers depends on the company’s health, while they are killing us doing it. Free trade crusader George Will wrote that the disappearance of whole categories of jobs could be desirable. He invoked the late UMWA leader John L. Lewis once saying that he hoped to see the day when no man would make his living by going underground. Will forgot to mention that when the mine owners introduced automation into the mines, they did not eliminate the deadly job of coal mining. The “man killer” continuous miner made the profession even deadlier. MAKING KILLER JOBS MORE DEADLY Other labor leaders such as Walter Reuther of the UAW blindly welcomed automation, saying, “You can’t fight progress.” Containerization at the docks eliminated the majority of longshore jobs. Even so, President Espinosa of the ILWU claimed victory when in the latest contract companies allowed union jurisdiction over any new jobs created by automation--as if automation “creates new jobs” while “old” jobs go overseas. A worker once joked, “Of course Bush has created millions of new jobs. Overseas.” In production, as it is in war, we keep dying so that they can keep expanding. Capitalism has always needed to expand to offshore regions in order to survive. The only way to put an end to “offshoring” is to put an end to capitalism itself. |
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