The U.S.: Where Europe comes to slum

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerson-europeans-20110515,0,3990894.story

<snip>

But slumming in America is fast becoming a business model for some of Europe's leading companies, and they often do things here they would never think of doing at home. These companies — not banks, primarily, but such gold-plated European manufacturers as BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen and Siemens, and retailers such as IKEA — increasingly come to America (the South particularly) because labor is cheap and workers have no rights. In their eyes, we're becoming the new China. Our labor costs may be a little higher, but we offer stronger intellectual property protections and far fewer strikes than our unruly Chinese comrades.

Don't take my word for it. Check out the study released this month by the Boston Consulting Group, which concludes that when you compare China's soaring wages and still-low levels of productivity with our stagnating wages and rising levels of productivity, the price advantage of manufacturing in China instead of the U.S. will shrink to insignificance by 2015. Investment in the U.S., says the group, "will accelerate as it becomes one of the cheapest locations for manufacturing in the developed world."

Those investments are well underway. The auto companies of Europe and Japan have opened factories in the nonunion South over the last couple of decades. Not one of them has agreed to refrain from waging a union-busting campaign should their workers wish to organize. Their stance could not be more different from their attitude toward workers and unions in their home countries.

As a report released by Human Rights Watch late last year documents, companies that routinely welcome unions, pay middle-class wages and have workers' representatives on their corporate boards in Germany and Scandinavia have threatened their U.S.-based employees with permanent replacement by other workers as the penalty for protesting wage cuts (that was the German manufacturer Robert Bosch), ordered workers to report on fellow workers' pro-union activities (that was T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) and disciplined workers who couldn't show up for unscheduled weekend shifts announced on Friday night (that was IKEA, according to an L.A. Times story).

<snip>

And it makes me fucking sick. Ooh, a company wants to come in and provide low-wage jobs so it doesn't have to do so in its own country? And we'll throw tax breaks and exemptions at them so our towns and schools suffer? Ohhh, yes, please, sign us up! In fact, we'll have governors compete to cut their own throats deeper than the rest in order to get these wonderful, wonderful plants! Ohhh, PLEASE!

I dare them to say so after reading this.

And they do have a point. They aren't very good jobs, not middle-class jobs, but they ARE jobs.

I know about this attitude because I'm from Montana. I was an Army Reservist with a whole bunch of men who worked for many years at the W.R. Grace plant in Libby Montana. That is the place that is now a super-fund site because of the really bad asbestos. It's the worst form, the type that works itself into your lungs and never gets out.

(Sometimes I wonder if I get bronchitis and asthma every time I catch a cold, because as a kid I used to play in piles of the vermiculite stuff. I still remember the unusual smell of that asbestos dust. If you were a kid in western Montana, in the 60's and 70's, you played in piles of asbestos. It was used in playgrounds, etc. like mulch is now or gravel, because it was the cheapest stuff since it was from a town right down the road.)

Anyway, the workers were never told about the danger. They were given protective masks, which is a credit to W.R. Grace, but the dust clogged the masks so quickly that the workers just said "the heck with this" and took off the masks.

The company doctor didn't tell the truth either when the workers started getting sick in their 50's from mesothelioma. Oh, and even years after they knew it was dangerous stuff, they still sold it to families for insulation and gave it to schools for playgrounds. When I was playing in it as a kid in the 1970's, the managers of the company knew full well kids could get cancer down the road, from playing in that stuff. To me, that's just wrong.

When you talk to people who lived in that town before it became a super-fund site, they just shrug their shoulders and say, "well, that's how it goes." There is a kind of resignation. "At least it was a job." And they have a point. Jobs aren't easy to come by in Montana. And the traditional jobs like ranching and farming come with their own risks including mortality. Life is kind of hard for a whole lot of people in Montana and so there is just an acceptance of all of this.

I'm from Montana too. And I understand about how jobs are jobs and hard to come by and you need them to feed your family. But I don't think it's okay for companies to do what W.R. Grace did in Libby.

"If we sell out our environmental and worker safety laws and local infrastructure, along with offering a 10-year tax break, then maybe WE can attract some of those companies!"

VA's government has had that mindset as long as I can remember...

With the economy so bad, they want us all just to be grateful for a job, any job.

With all the goodness that implies.

When we purchase our goods from other countries due to an economic advantage in doing so, it pisses us off because laborers in other countries are making pennies a day to make our iphones and TVs.

When WE make iphones and TVs for ourselves and the rest of the world due to anti-union activities and high productivity, despite the fact the laborers are making upwards of $30k, we still get pissed?

We can either import or export; I'll take the export any day.

Worse than their domestic employees?

Do you really think it MATTERS to most people that they are only making $30k?

And I'm now old enough that I don't expect I shall ever work for someone else again.

Perhaps you should try again.

I don't care who's doing it.

makes that possible? Our UNIONS. Unions set the standards for US labor, and now those standards are being eroded and the unions undermined by corporations setting up shop in "right-to-work" states - corporations who prefer not to deal with unions in their own countries. As another poster put it - that is called scabbing.

We are becoming those "laborers in other countries...making pennies a day".

I'm sure those laborers in China also would "take export any day".

http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Uniquely/BMWInTheCommunity/Education.aspx

I'd bet money they have mininum wage to unpaid student "research" or "service learning" labor.

The rest of the world still believes our higher ed establishment is the one area in which America prevails, so university partnerships in the South are a nice two-fer there.

Even better, and consistent with the comment on the MBA involvement . . .

http://www.clemson.edu/newsroom/articles/top-stories/Schmitz_JustenBBS.php5

.
"CLEMSON — Clemens Schmitz-Justen, former president of BMW Manufacturing LLC in Spartanburg, has joined the College of Business and Behavioral Science at Clemson University as director of international programs.

Schmitz-Justen will lead the college in moving forward with plans to internationalize the educational and networking opportunities for students.

"We are excited to have Clemens join the college. His international experiences in corporate and academic realms will greatly benefit our students as they enter the global workforce and support the ongoing international affiliations of the faculty," said Claude Lilly, dean of the College of Business and Behavioral Science at Clemson.

"I am very excited about taking the international activities in the college to the next level," Schmitz-Justen said, recognizing Clemson's vision of internationalization. He sees great potential for adding to the international visibility of the university."

The whole country will end up like this if the right isn't stopped.

Everyone has seen what the republicans have been doing at the state level recently.

They want the whole country to be like those areas in the South and LA. That's why they're attacking unions and workers so strongly right now.

This is their vision for the future. This is the world that republicans, and republicans in democratic suits, want to create. This is the world that your children and grandchildren will have to live in.

"The New China" is that future. That's what the U.S.A. is going to end up being.

once shown how much better their counterparts across the water have it...

But since the power structure makes us grovel and beg for jobs, employees never want to rock the boat...

"damn lazy French who spend all their time on vacation" and are proud to be working 60+ hours a week for far less pay and benefits than their 30 hour a week French worker gets.

Here's the deal: Europeans are always wrong and Americans are always right. Americans always do everything better than the Europeans. America is #1 and it's unpatriotic to point out the worsening conditions and crumbling infrastructure. Those Europeans are socialists anyway with their free schools and universal health care and welfare and old-age pensions. And everyone knows socialism is evil and that Hitler was a socialist, so really those French people are all clones of Hitler! Really, why can't you dumb libtards understand all this?

:sarcasm:

Only this time it's based on economic and social class, not on skin color.

There will be some real pissed off bubbas when they finally wake up to what happened to them after they helped elect all these corporate owned republicans.

and go back to times when children had to work in factories and mines instead of being able to go to school, they will just say "It's God's will and aren't we so lucky they gave little Johnnie a job at ten cents an hour. If it were up to those damn liberals Johnnie would have been wasting time learning to read and write instead of working for the wonderful W.R. Grace company! If each of us works 80 hours this week we might even be able to buy some flour and Crisco at the company store so we can eat biscuits instead of mud and grass like we usually do!"

In fact, most Southern white men are followers. I know it's a generalization, but I've seen it all my life.

Oh, there's lots of tough talk and bravado. But, in the end, they say "yes, sir" and do what the boss says - pretty much without question.