Al, it was my impression that you hated postmodern bullshit. Next, you will start spouting off Chomskyan linguistics (I sensed that you secretly yearned to team up with him). I certify all of your posts and comments, past and future (some postmodernists don't believe in the present), to be semantic spooks. Just when I thought you couldn't get any lower, you go and do something like this. . . and totally un-redeem yourself.

Much of the comments and arguments at the post "Free Traders and Globalizers - Waking Up at Last?" were about quality of life in America. It is an abstract concept--you can't sense it with the five senses, although certain aspects of "quality of life" can surely be sensed. I can damn well sense when I have food to eat, a place to live, and the women. . . I could go on and on about the women. Apparently some would prefer to let conditions in America develop without any governmental interference, even if they deteriorate to the conditions experienced by the people of the Soviet Union on a daily basis. Is the following your dream? "Let's make the US a third-world country. How dare some people try to meddle with the system and attempt to make it better? Fools. Corporations were meant to rule the world. It is their destiny. It is our destiny to be mindless, worthless cogs who beg for work and who live and die at the whim of the cold corporate machine." Al, this dream is a nightmare.

Al said: "At some point, this talk about exporting 'your job' just amounts to a nicer or more subtle way of saying that the world owes you a living."
We can affect the situation, Al, regardless of whether or not we are talking about abstractions. Are we owed jobs? Article 23 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights says the following:

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

DG, this is obviously a very emotional topic for you. I don't think it is necessarily a dive into the postmodern pool to point out the easily-forgotten fact that a job isn't a thing, but a relationship. One needn't even get into the linguistic angle to say this. The point is that jobs are fluid, always have been, and always will be. Even the UN ideal you cite doesn't say anything about a "job," but "right to work," which is an entirely different matter.

yes, a job is a relationship.

i just think it's a little sad how people who have faith in the ReligionOfTheMarketPlace(tm) seem to not care one wit about this current 'transformation'.

i'm not even arguing for legislative action...heck, i'm not sure what (if anything) should be done.

...but this is some serious shit.

You have once again set up a straw man argument that you handily defeated. (Bravo!)

In the real world, the piece you linked to does start with the term 'your job' but has nothing to do with the entitlement tangent you went off on.

Jobs are being exported (Free traders and globalizers - Waking up at Last?) and are being replaced by jobs paying much lower wages (The Myth of Job Recovery).

The effect is a rapid diminution in the quality of life in America.

Why do you think this is a good thing?

I understand and have lived through this. But how is this different from the dotcom bust where an entire industry went away? I agree that often the exporting of jobs is shortsighted and contrary to longterm growth and stability, but isn't the answer to make the corporations SEE that this is the case and work the business angle? Don't do it=it's stupid. Here's why ...

there are parallels between this and the .com bust. but there are future repercussions that are just being talked about.

i wrote a short post on these issues a few days ago.

Eric: "but isn't the answer to make the corporations SEE that this is the case and work the business angle? Don't do it=it's stupid. Here's why ..."

No.

That's naive because from the business angle it's not stupid.

Multinational corporations don't care where their profits come from, and have no loyalty to any particular nation. As events have shown, they can quickly and easily switch capital, plants and labor to another country without missing a beat. An example I found striking was a company building a $250 million plant in Mexico in 1999, then shutting it down last year and moving their production to China, just writing off that NAFTA-induced investment.

There are a lot of interacting factors that made this possible, but include rapid mobility of capital that the IMF and World Bank enabled (even globalization champion Jagdish Bhagwati admits this is a problem), pseudo-free-trade that's not free trade, better communications, and others.

The single biggest factor that could have been controlled may be a particular group of millionaires.

They have not only stood by but encouraged, aided and abetted the downward spiral of domestic quality of life in the pursuit of profit. They like to see companies making more money because that raises stock prices and they get richer.

In fact, they've convinced most Americans that a higher stock market is a good thing. It used to be good for Americans, but that was in the good old days (up until about 20 or 30 years ago) when stock market profits were reinvested in America. That's not happening, as millions of unemployed or under-employed Americans can tell you.

Note that I'm not talking about the rich in general, just a particular group.

I find this group's actions particularly reprehensible because they are pledged to protect your interests, but instead only look out for theirs. This group is politicians, Republicans and Democrats both. The "fight" between them is largely a fight for turf and perks, not a fight to protect your interests.

Sure, there are individual exceptions, but that's the view once-over-lightly.

How to deal with it?

I think the first thing to do is dump the incumbents and let the replacements know why. Once the replacements get too comfortable and start into business-as-usual, replace them. Voting along party lines is not in your own best interest.

What this translated to for me is that I did what I could to get rid of Democratic governor Gray Davis here in California (the legislature still needs the treatment) and support a Democrat, any Democrat who can win, at the federal level. It's not much, but I don't have a lot of power in this arena.

What to do about the down-grading of the quality of American life, the lower wages, the poorer jobs available, the dropping standard of living? I haven't figured that one out yet.

"What to do about the down-grading of the quality of American life, the lower wages, the poorer jobs available, the dropping standard of living? I haven't figured that one out yet."

I can't remember what post it was earlier, but what makes you think this condition will persist in the long-term? What makes you so sure that the labor pool in this country won't reallocate? Maybe this will spark idea generation and new companies will pop up to fill niches that the big guys haven't thought of yet. Sure people are out of work in the short term, but are they going to take available jobs working at McDonald's and Burger King? I would venture to say there will be a good percentage of people who will have ideas and start their own companies based on ideas that were too little for the multi-nationals.

Anyway, it's just an idea, but I really can't stand this apocalyptic outlook because I think it really sells a lot of the people in this country short. If you think skilled, qualified people are going to sputter in under-paying positions without taking a risk to try and start their own gig, or latch on to someone else's new gig, I think you are falling for the ever-tempting bleakness.

Talk to an economist sometime. They might tell you that what can be painful in the short-term (layoffs) could pay off in the long-term in new companies and new industries even as a market naturally reallocates itself.

A phrase from Eric: "make the corporations SEE that this is the case and work the business angle."
I agree that we should force corporations to see, but the only entity that has this power is the government. It is the tool with which we make corporations, institutions, and organizations see. We have long known that the business world is shortsighted and profit-driven. We need to make the long-term plans, then.

I don't disagree that a job is a relationship. I do think that each person has a right to a job. At least it should be a goal of our government to ensure that every willing person can have a job/work/symbiotic-relationship-of-coexistence-from-which-both-employer-and-employee-profit/whatever you want to call it.

I agree with what Hal said about corporations not caring. In an interview on "Now with Bill Moyers," George Soros (who opposes Bush and has helped fund Moveon.org--we're getting it from both sides) said the following:

As a market participant, if you want to be successful, I think you just have to look out for your own interests. . . .

It is amoral. Now, it's very often understood and understood as immoral. And that is a very different, being immoral. If you hurt people deliberately or you know, that's immoral. If you break the law, that's immoral. If you play by the rules, that is the market itself is amoral.

If you impose morality on it, it means that you are actually with your hands tied behind your back and you're not going to be successful. It's extremely hard to be successful.

We aren't shipping idea-generation and innovation overseas. This could just push more people into a position where they can be the people who gain on the margin of shipping non-value-add work overseas right? We might become a nation of managers. Why is it that you just automatically assume that lost jobs of one kind will not yeild different jobs over time? I am not saying it will definitely happen, but what are the chances that people are going to sit on their ass and watch their lifestyle circle the drain?

a nation of managers? if all of the lower-end jobs disappear there'll be nobody to manage.

then there's the problem of kids coming out of school...where tech degress have been rendered meaningless as there are no longer any entry level positions.

Actually, we are "shipping idea generation and innovation overseas." Check out the link to the Business Week article on "The Rise of India" in my most recent BC item. Here's a sobering quote from that article: "This means India is penetrating America's economic core."

Saying "we'll be managers or idea generators or innovators or ..." is just wishful thinking, even discounting the fact that relatively few people have the capacity to be those things.

And why on earth would the people "there" want or need us to manage them from "here"? There are more of them, they're at least as smart as we are and they work for less. And in a lot of cases, do a better job.

This is an unusual time in history, so the historical precedents don't mean as much as they once did. In the past we had the advantages of resources and technology and capital. Those aren't ours alone anymore, so the advantages are disappearing as we speak.

Sure, most Americans will be working eventually (whatever the unemployment rate becomes), but opportunities for upward mobility are shrinking. The quality of available jobs is dropping, and children are getting worse jobs than their parents had (recent business Week article). Replacement jobs are paying less than the jobs which were exported. Average household income is dropping.

You ask: "What are the chances that people going to sit on their ass and watch their lifestyle circle the drain?"

The answer is: Quite high if you haven't contacted your Senators and House Representative and put some pressure on them to stop the slide.

Pollyanna had her chance and failed.

I think that there has to be a medium somewhere.

I don't think that Corporations have everybody's best interest at heart...they have the 'stockholders' interest at heart. The stockholders want to see a return on their investment. If you want to see a change in policy, then we as americans need to band together and buy US made products.

If the corporations take a big hit in the wallet, they will start paying attention to what we think is important. That is the only way to get 100% co-operation from the corporations is to make it profitable. If you just want to enact laws and enforce them you will always have them doing the absolute least amount that is legal and trying to find ways around it instead of embracing it. Then you have to create people to regulate and enforce it.

It will always be the money that drives companies, it is what drives us. We all want to be able to pay our bills, have a roof over our head, a vehicle that works, heat, food, etc. Once those items are met then we all want to be able to take a vacation, have some entertainment toys, etc. Most of us want to improve our lives and leave something for our kids.

We need to find a way to make that work in our favor.

Al, to paraphrase Hedwig, 'murrica will be working the job known as "blow".

You can't keep gutting the middle and expect things to get better.