'Global Consumers', Maybe Democrats Sell Out Chinese Labor and More

WHAT FAREED ZAKARIA DIDN'T TELL YOU

I was looking for Bruce Bawer's interview with Bill Moyers last night (I was late and missed it), but I caught his interview with John MacArthur, Harper's publisher.

WHY 'NET ROOTS' IS NOT A BAD IDEA

Basically, MacArthur's thesis, fairly well defended so far as I could tell, is that the Democratic Party has 'sold out' on trade issues, either because they don't understand them enough to formulate a defensible policy or because, perhaps more likely, they sell out the issue in order to fund raise. (In his view, my writing about a "Lion of the party" is a vain hope, indeed, on trade issues.) MacArthur puts his arguments in the context of fast-track, which amounts to an end-run around the democratic process. Given the eye-popping issues in ceded sovereignty associated with NAFTA, I'm inclined to take him at his word ...

Now, I'm pretty pro-business (whatever that means, exactly, but take it to mean 'against artificial restraint'), but when China labor is either free (see below) or costs just 3% on average of US wages as far out as the eye can see, then I start thinking that these disproportions ought to be managed.

There ought to be some 'enforceability' of international labor standards, in terms of carrots and sticks. What's more, because 'structural shifts' are costly in the U.S. and for all the reasons in my prior post, some type of equalization tax or 'transition tax' seems in order, just so long as it is not too high.

To be sure, 'trade policy' is complex and not nearly as sexy to 'net roots' as is, say, war ethics - perhaps. But, make no mistake about it, the fact that issues as important as trade policy can float by on fastrack with high-level Democratic approval is just as much meat for the grinder.

Jehangir S. Pocha, in this issue of The Nation:

Global consumers buying $25 Chinese-made DVD players usually assume Chinese labor is cheap because the country has a limitless supply of poor workers. But the morally cumbersome truth is that the Chinese government systematically prevents workers from being paid the full value of their labor. Chinese workers can join several state-controlled unions, but since the state and politically connected clans, or families, own most of the Chinese economy, official union representatives who work too zealously first get a warning smack on the wrist--then worse. Ask Kong Youping. After Kong, a trade union official in Liaoyang, raised the ire of local officials by fighting doggedly for the rights of recently laid-off workers, he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

This power imbalance between owners and workers in China means that almost 200 million Chinese workers go to bed every night in overcrowded dormitory rooms after having worked eighteen-hour days in Dickensian factories where some employees are literally worked to death. The phenomenon has even added a new word to the Mandarin vocabulary: guolaosi, or overwork death, where fatigued workers fall off their stools bleeding from the ears, nose and anus.

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