Economic Day Upside Down
The American Dream is Burning Away
About 92 million Americans are jobless. 50 percent of American human resources is not being used. About 55 percent of young black Americans are unemployed. The unemployment rates are fiction. Only about 38 percent of all American workers qualify for unemployment insurance. Most workers if they have a job do not work long enough in any given period or do not make enough money to qualify. This adds up to more than 60 percent of all workers living in economic limbo - economic refugees in their own country. Many are missing in action giving up hope of ever finding a job. Part time jobs, casual labor jobs, contract jobs, temporary jobs, leased jobs outnumber full time jobs. In the past, unemployment rates were primarily based on full time workers with benefits. What we had is gone. What we have is yet to be defined since President Obama was forced to bail out the free trade economic process in 2008.
However, he only bailed out big money interests, banks , financial communities , the stock market and the "too big to fail" corporations. He ignored the sufferring of millions who lost thier jobs and businesses. He ignored the "too small to be saved businesses too.
Free trade is not trade. It is an economic system that divorces investments from production and moves production anywhere in the world for the sake of cheaper labor costs and more profits for a chosen few. It manipulates the value of workers and labor for the sake of investments. The value of workers and labor is degraded and deflated. This represents trillions of dollars lost forever.
The only thing that will save us now is to quickly reshore our economy and our industrial base. Searching for bright blue collar workers won't do it. Millions were cut out of the picture years ago. The industrial unions are virtually gone. Also in the past, it was the factory foremen who took the young off the streets and taught them a skill. In turn the young were able to get married, have a family, buy a home and help their children to go to college.
While going to college full time in the 1950s, I also worked at four different factories at the same time. I later was an assistant plant manager and also represented the company in union negotiations. Even when the unions were strong and arrogant, all workers were better off - union and non union workers. The Blacks were finally finding middle class wages as production workers too. If the factory jobs I enjoyed while in college were still available there would be millions standing in line to get them including college graduates.
My biggest business mistake was thinking the American workers would wake up when free trade came and would not shop their way out of their jobs. They did and they keep doing it even now. In the past we had local and value added economies.there were several layers of added value from the raw product stage to the manufacturing stage with a vast distribution levels supporthing all of it.
Assembling things was just a small part of the whole. Factory production then was making things from the bottom up and not just putting something together with parts coming from the wage slave markets of the world. Free trade is actually the slave trade of our times. Back then we counted on the Made in the USA label which meant everything was composed of American components including the processing. This label is rare today. Many parts of the manufacturing process is sent somewhere else in the world and then brought back for finaly assembly. Today, they use the term Built in America which means the product is only assembled here. Just out of high school, I was a set up man for three assembly lines which was a real accomplishment back then. I took over a job that a person held for many years. The product was home and industrial oil furnaces. When the orders slowed down, the workers were taken off the assembly line to make the parts so that none of these experience workers would have to be layed off. I help make worm geers that drove some of the furnaces. It was a specialty and not something everyone could do. Many others were accomplished in making other components. The parts grew in value just sitting in inventory too. Also the component material came from some other process in house or from some local producer nearby. Transportation was a major factor and was a major cost overhead back then. Today, free trade wage slave labor is so cheap that it can absorb the overhead of massive long haul ocean, air, rail and truck shipping. This overhead is also a dangerous source in the polluting of our atmosphere. Only about 15 of the largest cargo ships contaminate the world more than all the automobiles being used in the world. On top of this the products are also made in dangerous dirty conditions that we would have never approved back then. In our country when environmental reglutions start growing, more and more factory processes were sent outside the country. And this is still be done today in all phases of manufacturing even by those carrying the label Made in the USA. In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, many factories went to the maquiladora factories in Mexico just on the other side of the border. This made headlines for a time. There were many articles about the rise in leukemia and birth defects on both sides of the border. However this became old news fast as everyone start doing it. Only a few even talk about it For example our energy saving light bulbs travel 8,000 miles to get to market using up all the energy related to long haul shipping. The bulbs come from dirty manufacturing facilities where mercury is is out in the open. There are even pregnant mothers who work around the clock making the bulbs with many cutting themselves in the process with the mercury near by. This should be a big story but it is not.
Instead we have people like Thomas Friedman from the New York Times telling the American workers they have to be better than average. He gives the example of Steve Jobs demanding immediate production of his new I Pod or some other electronic device from Chinese factories. Here Chinese workers work around the lock and Freidman even referred to them only needing a bowl of rice. He also tells workers they have to compete with robotic automation without noting that machines do not paytaxes. Human beings are put against machines that do not have the overhead of the entitlements and so the entilements come under attack too. As to the training of workers. I learned everything on the job and companies like Honeywell/GE computers sent me to their corporate schools for a year while paying me a good wage. In the factories I was taught to be a good spot welder, a punch press operator and a bendermachine operator. All these took certain skills and workers like myself were taught on the job and not somewhere else. I found a deep void between my work day and my college classrooms. Neither side knew what the other was going through. This hasn't change. We have a real commications problems. This is another major void with those who lead us do not even know it exist. I write about it at https://tapsearch.com/communications-by-rank. As far as training of workers are concerned , the present corporate world in a bitter competitive arena will do anything to get the job done as cheap as possible. They will take workers to train, evern take government money to support them, for say a six month period at a low wage and promise them regular work and a higher rate of pay after the six months. Most of them never make it past the six months while the company finds a new way of cutting the cost of labor. They just keep recyling the temporary workers. This is possible because of the vast surplus of workers who need a job no matter what.
I learned more about the real world in the factories than I ever learned in college. To type factory workers as being less skilled and using the phrase - In search of bright blue collars - is something of an insult to all who gave up much to train workers on the job Ray Tapajna ( Letter to and editor at Cleveland Plain Dealer ) Cleveland Ohio USA