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RedditOUT, OUT, DAMN OUTSOURCING
We asked readers to comment on our March 22 forum, "Toward a Progressive View on Outsourcing," and we weren't disappointed. We heard from "one of the already marginalized medical transcriptionists," a "50-year-old progressive trying to hang on by the skin of my teeth to employment in the computer-programming industry," a Hollywood studio lighting technician berating "an international trade regime that protects and legitimizes job-raiding" and a man who headed to Alabama from Detroit in 1944 for construction work. Others suggested everything from a thirty-five-hour workweek and a $14 minimum wage, to a federal tax on the profits of outsourcing companies, to international wage-per-hour laws. Others see outsourcing as "born-again colonialism," with America at last "at the receiving end of globalization" and the "race to the bottom" as no longer a local problem but a global one. A reader who grew up in Oklahoma during the Great Depression predicts that "the 21st-century Great Depression will be much worse...." --The EditorsPortland, Ore.
Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh propose a new approach to international trade that would "include supports for internationally recognized labor rights as well as punishments for corporations that violate them." How to get there is the question. The usual answer is to place labor and environmental standards in trade agreements, but to date those standards have gone no further than requiring each country to enforce either domestic or internationally recognized labor and environmental laws. Given the great imbalance of power between multinational corporations and most developing countries (only thirty countries now have a GDP higher than that of Wal-Mart), it is neither useful nor fair to punish developing countries for not controlling corporate behavior.
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