As the economies in nations like China and India grow so will wages and demand for products and services. A middle class with disposable income is taking shape in other parts of the world even as our own middle class struggles to make ends meet.
Corporations do not respect national boundaries or patriotism. Their only "religion" is profit. Few have a moral code to regulate what they do to increase revenue at the expense of workers.
Here in the US, since the year 2000, over 40,000 factories of all sizes have shuttered their doors. Most of those jobs left the US for China and other nations because the labor is cheap and they are not collecting income taxes or providing health care or other benefits. Safety of workers is often not a consideration either. Moving our jobs off-shore saves them a bundle of cash which is more important to their CEO's than is the future of the economy in the country they like to call home.
Here at home where certain outsourcing is not practical or possible, many of these same corporations have laid off workers, cut wages and pushed the added workload onto those that remain. Longer hours at the same or lower wages is the "reward" offered to long time loyal employees that contributed years of their lives to those companies growth. These employees have often been required (illegally) to work over-time to take up the slack of laid off workers. They are told if they complain that there are plenty of unemployed who will take their place at an even lower salary. Now mom needs to work as well, leaving children unattended.
Let's look at the trend to eliminate many if not all benefits from the American middle class worker. Starting with union's collective bargaining rights, some right-wing states are doing all they can to steal worker's rights to negotiate in their own behalf or to safeguard working conditions. These politicians have been openly backed by some very wealthy and powerful business interests. Some of these stand to benefit by way of private contracts that will displace public workers. These contracts do not necessarily save taxpayers anything, but they do take control by the taxpayers over their own destiny by moving it into private corporate hands. Private prisons are one example.
In Wisconsin, some workers were laid off and their jobs given to "slave" labor from prisons. Will the huge incarceration rate in the US coupled with private for-profit prisons lead us to a nation of slaves, further increasing our rate of jobless honest citizens?
What we see at the core of this anti-middle class effort from the right is the intent to drive down wages here in the US and to make workers more dependent on the corporations for their futures.
Recall the days of the early mining corporations, fore runners of today's Oil giants. Mine workers were paid in company script, not in US dollars. That script could be spend only in a company store with inflated prices. Workers could rent company housing with the script. The entire system was designed to put workers in debt to the company, thus creating a virtual slave army to mine coal. This is what, after often bloody strikes, gave rise to unions. It is the means by which the middle class came to be, complete with safer working environments, pay in real money, the 40 hour work week and an end to child labor.
We see this middle class system under attack every day including the roll back of prohibition against child labor at the hands of the GOP governor in Maine. The result of a lower minimum wage for minors means adults will be displaced, children will push their own parents out of work. Children's educations will suffer and, as a result, they will become less able to command better pay in the future. Two more feathers in the GOP cap in the war against working Americans.
There is a corporate backed attack against our minimum wage and against over time pay.
Even as the right attempts to silence the voice of the workers, their patrons in industry are now freer than ever to organize anonymously to manipulate our elections to favor their chosen candidates who they are confident will continue this middle class assault on their behalf. We call their corporate "union" the US Chamber of Commerce which, by the way, also represents major foreign interests.
Why would the destruction of the US middle class be to the advantage of Corporate America? In a word...PROFIT !
Consider the information above regarding the population centers as a future source of consumers. The US is tiny compared to either China or India and tinier still compared to the world. If you are a corporation looking to larger markets we in the US don't have much to offer. At some point in time these CEO's and their political puppets realize that a growing middle class in China and India will drive up wages there but will also create a market place that dwarfs the US ten-fold in size. Even now these companies earn only about one-third of their profits here in the US. That gap will widen over time as we become less and less useful to them as consumers.
As grows China's middle class so will their wages grow. Wages equal spending on goods and service. Increasing wages in those fast growing middle class nations will also mean higher costs of production and more demands for health care, vacations, safer working conditions and so on. We are their role model. They want what we have including democracy.
If you are in the drivers seat of these corporations this is not good news for the future of your company profits. You will need a replacement source of cheap, easy to manipulate labor that is too scared of losing their jobs to complain. You also would do well to make the American middle class less of a desirable model for others to emulate. Kill two birds with one stone!
I believe that the real goal of the Corporate Right is to make ready a malleable lower-class cast of workers here in American to replace the current cheap labor force now being exploited in other nations. As those nations middle class incomes grow, they see a consumer market that dwarfs anything America can match.
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