Issues '08: The American Worker

Our grand game of Monopoly

Because I believe all media outlets owe a bit of public service, this column will be the first in a year long series of policy discussions dealing with all the things voters should be paying attention to but likely are not because of the most important news story of the decade: Paris Hilton. So while everyone has a pretty good idea of their Paris Hilton policy (“whore, deserves jail, felt bad when she cried”), not many seem to have the first clue about the state of American jobs.

My most informative glimpse of the U.S. economy came not from a college economics course but rather courtesy of a three month stint as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut in Oxford, Ohio. Naturally, I spent most of my time cruising around the small campus town, counting my tips, and wearing a silly hat. However, once in a while I would have to venture well past the campus I knew so well, making deliveries to the biggest houses in town on a road called “Country Club”. Other times, I delivered to the trailer park. It took me only a week to realize that these two sections of town, the richest and the poorest, were essentially side-by-side, separated only by a small grass field. And yet no road connected them. If I had two deliveries, one on Country Club and one in the trailer park, I would have to take a ten-minute detour through town to travel a distance of less than two hundred yards.

I love it when life speaks in easily digestible metaphors.

Currently, this country is watching as the division between the richest of us and the poorest of us stretches like hot taffy and a small group of Americans amass a fortune with complete disregard to those across the grass field. To vastly oversimplify the matter, our economy has turned into the equivalent of a game of 3 card monty, and the huckster asking us to step up to the table goes by the name of Free Trade. For the last 20 years, Democrats and Republicans alike have preached the gospel of free trade and how unregulated markets would create jobs, stimulate the economy, and give us all a happy ending after our massage. Now, years and years into this disastrous experiment, the American worker has come to realize that the snake oil he bought not only does not cure his rheumatism but somehow gave him diarrhea as well.

As high-paying manufacturing jobs continue to hemorrhage overseas to Asia, specifically China, they have been replaced not by the next generation of high-skilled labor, but by retail and service jobs that pay less, include fewer benefits, and operate largely without union support. Americans cannot compete with Asian workers making thirty cents an hour, and it’s unfair to ask them to in the name of free trade. Major corporations have relocated production operations to countries with few labor or environmental regulations where they can exploit a wretchedly poor workforce in the name of juicy, delicious profits (for those of you who don’t know, profits taste like chocolate and bacon). Free trade apologists will explain that these countries are simply utilizing their “comparative advantage”, a term I find only slightly more distasteful than “syphilitic rectal puss”. The idea is that countries should exploit what they have, so if you can grow coffee, export that. If you have trees, cut ‘em down. And if all you have is a bunch of easily exploitable women, lock them in a warehouse and have them stitch sneakers for twelve hours a day.

In this manner, everyone loses. Corporations trip over themselves to move American jobs overseas, while the countries they move them to manufacture a comparative advantage by making their working populace little more than glorified slaves. It ain’t just blue-collar workers either. White collar jobs have also stampeded off to India where the workers earn a fraction of what their American counterparts once made, the lesson being that if your job can be done by anyone anywhere else in the entire world than you are probably not safe. Luckily, impoverished young Asians make lousy Wal-Mart greeters, so those jobs are rock steady.

Speaking of Wal-Mart, there is no corporation that better epitomizes all that has gone wrong with U.S. economic policy. Basically, everything you find in a Wal-Mart is made in China, where the company “encourages” its suppliers to locate production so that they can continue to have that creepy yellow smiley-face slash prices with a wink and a grin that can only be described as strangely pedophiliastic. It’s not the only big-box retailer that deserves condemnation, but Wal-Mart is basically so fu**ed-up that it’s taken cutthroat corporate greed to an art form. Again, I will return to Oxford, Ohio as the perfect example of what Wal-Mart does to the average American town. Essentially, if you live, work, or go to school at Miami University and need to buy anything, you’ll probably have to go to Wal-Mart on the town’s far western edge (conveniently about a mile from the trailer park!). The only businesses that survive are those that sell some type of product or service that Wal-Mart does not (liquor, for instance; Miami kids know how to buy liquor).

As for its employees, Wal-Mart workers don’t make anything resembling a decent wage. According to a PBS report, workers take home an average of $250 a week and of the few employees who work enough hours to qualify, only half can actually afford Wal-Mart’s health care plan. Most of the time, the federal government picks up the tab for what Wal-Mart refuses to pay, in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, or a number of other welfare programs. Workers will certainly never demand anything better because the store has taken a near-obsessive approach to union-busting. Yet Wal-Martesque retail jobs are quickly becoming the standard for the millions of Americans who don’t go to college (and even some who did). An average of $2,500 in savings per American family that shops at Wal-Mart is a short-term benefit vastly outweighed by the long-term damage done to the American worker, who stands less and less of a chance of reaching that same middle class that turned this country into an economic powerhouse after the second World War. It reminds me of Monopoly.

Monopoly is the most brilliant board game ever invented because it illustrates how the end result of unrestricted capitalism is one person owning and controlling everything on the board. Sure, maybe another player manages to get a house or two at Illinois Avenue, maybe even a hotel on St. James Place, but eventually that poor bastard is going to land on Park Place and it’s game over anyway.

Free trade is the same way right now: lawless and benefiting only the greediest among us. Sure, we need to end tax incentives to companies shipping jobs overseas, close the loopholes that allow some corporations to pay less in taxes than a single mother working the night shift at a 24 hour diner, and it’s time to either scrap or drastically alter NAFTA, CAFTA, and a host of other free trade agreements that benefit only large corporations, but that’s not all. The U.S. has the greatest market in the entire world, and any business and any country that wants to make money knows it has to crack that market. In that case, it’s as simple as saying, “Clean up your act. In order to set up shop in the U.S. you gotta pay your workers a decent wage and enforce strict labor and environmental standards just like we do here.” Sure, this might drive the price of a pair of flip flops up a buck or two in the short term, but in the future it will return jobs to the U.S. while simultaneously raising working conditions in the world’s worst corners.

So to summarize: Don’t shop at Wal-Mart, join a union, and vote for fair trade candidates. Good, now that we have that settled we can finally move on to the Paris Hilton issue. Do you think her jail sentence was fair? Is she anorexic? What about conjugal visits?