No inalienable wage-level right

ARTICLE: In N.C., damage not easily mended, By Peter Whoriskey, Washington Post, November 10, 2009

An exploration of how weakly the U.S. pushes retraining in the aftermath of globalization's deadly competition wiping out local jobs.

I love the guy who used to work for $10/hour and won't consider anything less now. Good thing I'm not so uppity, because I wouldn't have made it through 2009 with that snotty attitude.

(Thanks: Ken Hanson)

Comments

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99% of the working Americans have forgotten that you're only worth what your services bring . . Not what a Government or Union survey says you're worth . . Few entry level workers are worth today's minimum wage, as far as what they bring to the table for their employers . . and a guy who puts on 5 lug nuts 200 times a day isn't worth $73 an hour . . no place in the world, really . . Someone in a second or third world country will gladly do it for $5 a day . .

Globalization means that somebody in a country elsewhere is bidding to do your semi skilled job for less than half of what an American worker is going to have to have . . and between technology and globalization, manufacturing jobs are being done away with or moving at an astounding rate . .

When I was teaching College Level Skilled trades, I advised every student, that, in the future your marketable skill(s) had a practicable future of only five to eight years . . after that, your skill was (or would be) obsolete. And along with it, the income level that you had worked up to . . So without study and training in the next skill or vocation, you end up in the same situation the guy who manufactured typewriter keys . . Lots of unneeded skill . .

[stuart abrams]

I'll bet that most of these factories, especially textiles, opened up in North Carolina during the '50s and '60s when manufacturers moved out of the north, for example, NYC's garment center, in order to take advantage of the non-union labor that was available in "right to work" states like North Carolina. Globalization started within our own "free trade union."

[Larry Y]

someone tell that to the Wall Street banksters...

[Louis Heberlein]

Bill Clinton and his Labor Secretary understood the transformational aspects of emerging technologies and globalization. Clinton used DARPA and NIST to define requirements, demonstrate the methods, and establish US based international technical standards. Unfortunately they could not get the Labor Department/Congress to think ahead in transformation perspective, as opposed to past/waning business/labor interests.

I wish they would do an extended TV interview to discuss the lessons of that experience.

The pattern is now repeating on Smart Grid and energy transformation stuff. We define and demonstrate it. Folks in China & India, and parts of Europe exploit them. All I see in our media is how new things 'might' have problems.