The new scabs

While reading Senator Dorgan's book "Take This Job and Ship It" one thing that has become abundantly clear is that foreign labor has now become the equivalent of scabs and union busters and may be even more difficult to overcome.

I can appreciate that people in other nations need jobs but I fail to see how the American worker can compete against workers who make 30 cents an hour and work 60, 70, and 80 hour weeks or more. This will merely lead to jobs leaving America at a breakneck pace waiting for every other country that America could possibly outsource jobs to to raise their labor standards to the point where American laborers can compete. This is unreasonable.

I do think that at the current time it is unsustainable and unreasonable to refuse to trade with any country that doesn't meet our labor standards. It would essentially mean the end of most of our international trade for years. I think that, as Dorgan suggests, we should close tax break loopholes and make it at least profit neutral to export jobs so that American workers can compete. This will also serve to make sure that American corporations are paying their FAIR share of taxes that they have gotten on the back of the American consumer.

On a closing note, the one thing that I think we may eventually be able to legitimately learn from free trade with places like Canada is that universal health care is a great idea. A country that provides universal healthcare can afford to pay lower wages to its workers because those workers do not have to worry about buying healthcare. Because of this I'm not sure that America will ever be able to keep up in free trade with Canada until we have a single payer (or at least universal) health care system.