Another Last for America

(This YouTube is for Beata with love.)

I live about 1/2 mile from an old Levi Strauss factory. One part of it is now combination art studios/apartments for New Orleans Artists. The other–across the street–is a church that houses a food pantry and second hand store. I wasn’t around the neighborhood when it closed, but I distinctly remember when Levi jeans quit making their all-American product in the U.S.A. Nothing says the US west, working class, and hippies like Levi Jeans. The only thing that made it sad news, bad news, but not mad news is that Levi Strauss doesn’t have a lot of government contracts but that doesn’t mean that the U.S. taxpayer doesn’t lose something.

The same cannot be said for GE which closed its US last light bulb factory this month.

The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s.

The remaining 200 workers at the plant here will lose their jobs.

“Now what’re we going to do?” said Toby Savolainen, 49, who like many others worked for decades at the factory, making bulbs now deemed wasteful.

During the recession, political and business leaders have held out the promise that American advances, particularly in green technology, might stem the decades-long decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. But as the lighting industry shows, even when the government pushes companies toward environmental innovations and Americans come up with them, the manufacture of the next generation technology can still end up overseas.

You’ll notice that this is even more troubling because the push to go greener actually expedited the outsourcing process in this case. I personally like my incandescent light bulbs in the winter. They stop my heating system from coming on full blast. I use them in the winter months. But, I suppose that wasn’t factored in to the equation. Just like the loss of more American manufacturing jobs didn’t appear to be a consideration either.

This is another story that tells a cautionary tell. Lots of workers in their 50s are now obsolete and lost in a never never land of a bit too early for social security/medicare and a bit too late for gigantic student loans and retraining. It’s no wonder that every single community college in the country is popping at the seams and has waiting lists for basic classes. Unfortunately, state budgets are so bad that tuition is up and class and teacher availability are down. All at the time when most universities/colleges have teachers that are also close to retirement.

But officials are working against a daunting trend. Under the pressures of globalization, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been shrinking for decades, from 19.5 million in 1979 to 11.6 million this year, a decline of 40 percent.

At textile mills in North Carolina, at auto parts plants in Ohio, at other assorted manufacturing plants around the country, the closures have pushed workers out, often leaving them to face an onslaught of personal defeats: lower wages, community college retraining and unemployment checks.

Globalization is a two-edge sword and always has been. The first thing that you teach is that it creates winners and losers. Every one who buys the products wins because they will be very very cheap in comparison. The losers are the employees and the municipalities that rely on the company for jobs, incomes, and tax revenues. I don’t think the theoreticians every really looked at how incredibly disruptive the adjustments of wages and prices would be to all this ‘factor mobility’. Most of the time capital wins too.

When NAFTA was signed, Bill Clinton ensured that there would be job training funds for folks that could prove they were displaced due to NAFTA. It was used quite a bit in Mississippi by the women that belonged to the Ladies Garment Workers. Again, like the factory in my neighborhood, women in the south are no longer required to sew Levi Jeans and sheets and blankets like they used to do. What are they retrained to do in Mississippi? Basically, home health care work, practical nursing, and resthome work. Not exactly good paying union jobs to replace the ones that they had. They could become RNs, but many have not followed that path. Here’s a pretty good synopsis of the literature at the time from 2002 that showed how folks laid off from airline jobs in the 1990s were retrained into other lines of work. I guess I went back to that time period because the unemployment rate–even the structural one–was falling at the time which is quite different from right now. As you can see, a lot of these workers who were successful in manufacturing have a different skill set than is needed for service-type jobs.

We just celebrated labor day. It’s become more of day for the last day of picnics than the celebration of American Labor and the progress brought to the American worker by Labor Unions. Forty hour work weeks have been replaced by being paid by the piecework. Everything related to cloth is put together some place else. I can speak to the joyful busting up of teacher’s unions down here in Louisiana as tenure no longer means anything at any level down here. For some reason, it’s okay to hold a teacher accountable for some student’s test score, but not that student’s drug addicted or never-at-home-helping-with-homework parent. You gotta blame some one for all this fail and it’s the role of senior management to pass on the blame but never the profits of their bad decision making.

Sooner or later, this game will end because it is a zero sum game. There’s a new phenomenon in China. It seems that some workers would rather commit suicide than “bend” to the oppressive work environments that they now endure.

Yesterday, the company Foxconn, a leader in technology, which has seen 11 suicides this year in its Longhua factory (Shenzhen), announced 30% wage increase for assembly line workers. But experts point out the need to review the whole organization of work that has made China “the world’s factory” for the price of inhumane working conditions, for the exclusive benefit of Western capitalist multinationals and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Foxconn official sources have expressed their hope “that the wage increase will help improve the living standards of workers and allow them to have more free time.”

Analysts note, however, no one in China seems to want to address the issue of working conditions or the absence of unions to protect workers’ rights.

Faced with suicides motivated by work stress, Foxconn defends itself by saying that it does not violate the law and applies working conditions similar to those in other Chinese factories. According to the workers in the company, the “normal” working conditions include 12-hour shifts, with a ban on speaking with to colleagues, sitting or unnecessary absences. Workers are subject to a military discipline both at work and in company canteens and dormitories and are fined for the slightest offense, even washing their clothes in the dormitory. They are not allowed to contradict their superiors direct orders.

And this is country rooted in Marxist thought?

Oh, any of you members of the IBorg might want to look really seriously into this story. This folks are hard at work producing your Iphones, Ipads, and Ipods along with Dell computers and Nokia phones.

How long will the Chinese put up with these kinds of working conditions? How long will our purchasing behaviors let them?

The factory workers are typically very young women from the countryside, sent by their parents into the factories, to supplement their family income. They live in cramped cement-block barracks, eight or twenty to a room. They often work 12- or 18-hour days, under abysmal conditions, with no day of rest for months at a time.

Managers of major U.S. multinational corporations who produce their goods in Chinese factories, told ILO investigators-on condition of anonymity-that 80 percent of their contractors keep double or triple books, to hide the fact that they’re not paying minimum wages, not paying overtime, and breaking China’s maximum hour laws.

The factory conditions are appalling. Chinese workers suffer the highest rates of industrial deaths and lost limbs from industrial accidents in the world.

Chinese factory workers have little recourse against these abuses. If they complain, they’ll be fired, lose the deposit they had to pay their employer, the wages withheld and risk being thrown in jail by the Public Security Forces (China’s political police).

These abusive conditions are so widespread they have spawned new terms like “goulaosi”-death by over working. Another one, “tiaolou xiu,” which means jump-protestors, comes from the growing practice of China’s factory workers to threaten and at times commit suicide over working conditions or simply to get the pay they’ve earned.

One manager from Reebok, who is in charge of labor conditions throughout Asia, spoke openly about labor conditions in China. She said: “Who enforces Chinese labor law? Nobody. If it were enforced, China would be a much better place for millions of people to work in. But it is ignored more than in any other country I work in.”

Each time you turn on a light bulb this year, just think about this.

I’m not sure who I should ask you to send your prayers out to these days. The U.S. workers that will no longer be able to support their families and will be trapped in that never never land of unemployment we have these days or the Chinese workers who get to replace them.

Either way, workers lose, investors win, and you get your cheap electronic products and athletic shoes.