It's not a question of blaming trade deals OR blaming automation.

[karynnj]

67. You ignore globalization itself -- jobs were moving to cheaper places, in the US and overseas before

Last edited Sun Jan 8, 2017, 08:38 PM - Edit history (1)

any of the trade deals.

I hated the Democratic party debate, where Bernie Sanders blamed the decline of the rust belt on the trade deals - and HRC did not dispute that claim. I know that this was 100% sincere on his part - but it bothered me that the decline started when many factories were built in the non union south. By 1993, when NAFTA was voted on, many economists and politicians had alreasy observed that the then preceding 2 decades had been very different for two segments of America. The "yuppies", the educated elites were benefiting from large economic gains. Meanwhile, the laborers, clerks, etc were working harder than ever and even as households moved from one breadmaker to two were finding the American dream middle class life increasingly impossible. Referencing a then popular song, one Senator labeled his Senate speech, "What's NAFTA got to do with it.".

Since 1993, even in areas not affected by trade deals, we have seen the international outsourcing of not just manufacturing as in the 1970s and 1980s, but of a significant portion of white collar and professional jobs. (especially customer service and IT) This is legal and will continue as long as corporations look for the savings this undeniably provides.

I liked an oped I read in the Boston Globe by Jeffrey Sachs, who advised Bernie Sanders. He opposes TPP and TIPP, but not because he is against the entire concept of trade deals. His comments of what a trade deal should be are actually not far many of the people in the Obama administration who favor the TPP. https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/10/16/the-truth-about-trade/UWtu8jpAo8LTsTFlffaZ0K/story.html

The reason I like this oped is that I think there is a very difficult economic puzzle of how you can protect workers' rights and ensure that they are given a fair share of the country's wealth in a time where globalization is a reality. About a dozen years ago, I was asked by a very bright high school daughter to explain what the whole WTO issue (there were riots at the time) was and what was the real solution to her. She found it confusing and I had majored in Math and economics. Now explaining what was happening was pretty easy. The second question was the more important and I realized that nothing I learned on international economics in the early 1970s was remotely useful.

It seemed to me that, though it was not publicly heralded, what had happened was that we had entered a new phase in the relationship of employer/worker. If you look over time, you see that there were times where the imbalance of power between workers and employers led to exploitation. The most obvious was that when the great landowners switched between agriculture to grazing animals, it led to the migration of people, essentially evicted from their homes to the city. Almost concurrently, the industrial revolution used this essentially inexhaustible labor pool, which received a very small part of the gains. The correction was the labor union, which when all their trained works united and was willing to refuse to work - changed the balance of power.

Even in the 1950s when I was a kid, this was still the basic situation - while there were gains and losses in labor laws, the labor pool was still basically local. What changed was that the cost differential was big enough that companies moved to build new factories long distances away in first in the non union South and then overseas. In essence what this meant was that where the union, as the aggregate spokesman for all the employees who could not in total be replaced lost power relative to the corporation, which became bigger. In addition, where in the 1950s, the corporations were part of the communities they were based in. Community relations were important to them. Now, in addition to the corporations seeing that their labor pool is really international, they are international corporations, where the people making the decisions may never have set foot in the county reatly affected by their business decisions.

So, what can be done to rebalance that power relationship. How does a country like us insure the basic quality of life for people either working hard at jobs that are paying less or struggling to get jobs at all?

Solutions from the mid 1900s - like increasing tariffs - whether pushed by unions or Trump, are very unlikely to be helpful. They initiate a trade war which is counterproductive. So, how can a labor market establish workers' rights and higher wages, it might be that this is what trade deals should be doing -- or as is suggested, the gain of the winners because of trade deals need to be shared (via taxes) with the losers.