Thoughts about labor and the economy (Sept. 4)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
The Chinese right now are apparently beginning to worry because Americans aren’t buying enough from them. That’s because the burgeoning Chinese economy is heavily weighted toward manufacturing things that Americans and people of other countries buy. If we don’t buy, they don’t burgeon.
Other countries also are worried, because Yanks aren’t buying enough stuff from them, either.
That’s the story, anyway, from a just-concluded meeting held in Italy on the global economy.
It interests me that the work of America has gone from making what the world wants to buying what the world makes. The rest of the world would love nothing more than to have us start buying again, and in a big way. But our relative lack of spending right now has the world fretting.
On this Labor Day weekend, perhaps somewhere between a beer and a hamburger, we should ponder the present circumstances of labor.
One of the biggest unions now is the Service Employees International Union, whose members make very little in the way of product. Yes, they provide services, but those services mainly are for people who don’t make anything, either.
The United Auto Workers, the Steel Workers, and other crafts and trades unions represent far more people who actually make things, but there are far fewer of those jobs than before. The so-called “living wage” jobs of which they once boasted are diminishing every day.
That doesn’t mean the country is headed downhill, but it may mean some fundamental assumptions will be challenged.
For example, some 70 percent of the Gross Domestic Product is retail sales. Perhaps all those sales, while welcome, shouldn’t be used to measure economic output.
The shipping of jobs overseas, while beneficial to corporations, left an economic void. Has free trade gone too far? Is it now free giveaway, rather than free trade, of our economy’s fundamental economic structure?
