• Competing with serfs Competing with serfs Free trade is a good thing. But should American workers have to compete with a nation that holds millions of workers in industrial serfdom? That’s the question – and it’s a good one
• Competing with serfs
Competing with serfs
Free trade is a good thing. But should American workers have to compete with a nation that holds millions of workers in industrial serfdom? That’s the question – and it’s a good one – raised by the AFL-CIO in its petition for trade sanctions against China.
China has established a quasi-feudal system that traps workers in 30-cent-an-hour factory jobs. Government threatens them with exile to the countryside if they dare quit and prison if they protest. How can U.S. workers compete?
They can’t, say the unionists, so Uncle Sam should hoist barriers against Chinese goods until their government sets its workers free.
The union’s target is the Chinese system of “hukou,” or household registration. Under the system, people are generally required to live where they’re born. The system favors people who are born in cities, where the good jobs are. Those born in the hand-to-mouth poverty of the countryside have to get temporary work permits to move to the city.
To get a permit, a worker has to have arranged a job. Urban governments set aside only the worst, lowest-paid work for their country cousins. Once in town, the worker isn’t allowed to hunt for better. And if he quits, he’s deported back to the farms.
There are 780 million peasants in China. So, the system guarantees factory owners a ready supply of desperate people willing to work dirt cheap. China’s totalitarian government forbids true labor unions. Protests are met with billyclubs and prison sentences.
In effect, China has created a sub-caste of the oppressed, leashed to their employers and denied human rights. That explains why real wages in China’s factories have gone down over the past decade, while productivity has gone up.
The AFL-CIO estimates that Chinese wages are 47 to 86 percent lower than they would be if their government allowed a free market in labor, with workers free to move for better pay. That translates to a 12 to 77 percent price advantage for Chinese manufacturers.
No wonder 70,000 to 100,000 American jobs have moved to China every year in the 1990s, according to union estimates.
In the long run, free trade benefits all nations. But trade must be fair, too. The U.S. has failed to insist on guarantees of minimum labor and environmental standards in its trade treaties, and this is a serious mistake.
The AFL-CIO is pinning its hope for sanctions on Reagan-era trade laws that try to protect American jobs from exploitive labor practices overseas. The union’s complaint is a first under the law, and it’s high time.
Even if it wins its fight for sanctions, the union movement will not halt the drain of American manufacturing jobs overseas. Jobs that don’t leave for China will go to other countries where wages are far below American levels – Taiwan, Malaysia, India, Mexico and others.
But America should send China a message. Our European and Japanese friends should join in the chorus. That message is this: The root purpose of any society is to uphold the dignity and raise the living standards of all its people. The creation of an exploited sub-caste is intolerable.
And it’s unfair trade to boot. China has a habit of tilting the trading table, and its policy of undervaluing its currency is the prime example. The United States should use the AFL-CIO complaint as a wedge to negotiate a fair deal for workers both in China and America.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
