It's about fucking time! One of the things that is killing this country is the nonstop exportation of our jobs. Let's face it, we all can't be rock stars, CEOs, or stock market gunslingers. Some of us won't ever make it into the jobs that pay huge salaries: the rest of us (who make up about 95% of the population) work at the millions of jobs that are both necessary and non-glamorous. So, the news that China Drafts Law to Boost Unions and End Abuse (New York Times 10/13/06) is a step in the right direction. Maybe if the manufacturing jobs start getting close in pay around the world, there will be less incentive to export them from home.
In fact, maybe it will begin to heal our huge balance of payments deficit. If we begin building the "stuff" of our lives here at home rather than in Shanghai or Chengdu, we will create jobs for our own citizens and keep some of the dollars that now flow overseas in our own communities. Also, it may chop some of the obscene profits that have been flowing into the pockets of the owners of capital and redirect those dollars into the pockets of middle class Americans. More money to the middle class means more tax revenues for the government (middle class taxpayers don't have as many tax accounts and tax lawyers sniffing out every possible loophole in the tax code like the super rich have.)
So, I applaud any move by China to improve the lot of their workers, and I would urge every other country in the world to do the same. Even if America stops importing as much stuff from abroad, the workers with their higher pay will take up some of the slack, and the fact that there will be more money in the local economies will mean that the shop owners and farmers and all the rest of the citizens in those countries will also have more money available to buy the output from those factories. Again, for our country, the best possible foreign policy is to raise the economic levels of the rest of the world to bring them closer to our own.
Yeah! Go China!!
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