American Dream Has Been Outsourced

In the early 1990s, I lived and worked in Japan, and my wife and I occasionally traveled in the region. However, we refused to go to mainland China because we were still fuming over the spectacle of Chinese troops massacring Chinese students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.

So what happened when we ceased being expatriates and came home for good? We tried not to buy products made in China but found that nearly everything we needed or wanted was made, and made well at reasonable prices, in China. So much for our efforts to make a political statement with our U.S. passports.

“Made in China” has become so much a part of the American economic scene that I sometimes think that if the Chinese ever warred with us again, given the sorry state of our shoe and textile industries, we might have to go to them for boots for our soldiers. China now makes nearly 80% of the shoes purchased in the U.S.

Now, I am not an anti-industrialist Luddite or an anti-free-trade stalwart who loathes globalization. Nor do I believe that the U.S. should continue to manufacture lots of buggy whips and horseshoes when there’s obviously no longer a mass market for them. But a great country cannot remain great if its citizens spend most of their working lives pushing paper rather than making things -- high-tech things, mid-tech things and low-tech things -- within the country’s sovereign borders.

Not too long ago, most American workers produced most of the products we now buy from China, Japan, Korea and other nations.

And not too long ago, when American workers went on strike or were laid off because of economic downturns, they got their jobs back after the strike was settled or the economy improved. But nowadays our workers are more likely to find that they’ve been permanently “downsized,” or that their jobs have been permanently “outsourced” -- not to other places within the U.S. but to low-wage countries abroad.

In fact, more than 2 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have been lost in the last three years alone, many of them going overseas.

Economic theory teaches that employers must seek and find the lowest possible labor costs. Social reality, however, teaches that reaching that goal may not be the wisest course because people -- even those who lack the intellectual and educational abilities to adjust to high technology -- must have jobs. Like those in the higher-paid and more recession-proof professions, they must also be able to feed, clothe and care for their families. Otherwise, many of them will end up either supping on the public’s purse or living in the public’s prisons.

There is no doubt that capitalism is the greatest vehicle ever devised for producing wealth. And American capitalism has produced more of it than any other economic system in history. But for American capitalism to be more responsible and responsive to our democracy, its power must be tempered by that of government and unions.

Only wise government and strong unions can command livable wage scales, humane safety nets and increased vacations.

What it comes down to is this: In business, as in other areas of human endeavor, the optimum is not necessarily the enemy of the maximum. And the good is not always the enemy of the best.

If Airbus, the British-French airplane consortium, can give Boeing a run for its money, if Germany’s Mercedes-Benz can best Cadillac, and if Finland’s Nokia can outsell Motorola -- while all of them manage to operate with Europe’s shorter work week and much higher level of benefits -- only lack of corporate will and government mandate prevents U.S. companies from treating U.S. workers as well.

Edward Bernard Glick is a professor emeritus of political science at Temple University in Philadelphia.