On July 1, 2012, Columnist Steen Pearlstein writes in The Washington Post:
The battle has been going on since at least the 1880s, when the first New England textile mills began moving production to the Carolinas. Whatever name it goes by — “runaway plants,” “outsourcing,” “global sourcing,” “offshoring”— workers and the public tend to hate it, executives view it as inevitable and economists defend it as part of the painful process by which market economies prosper.
The debate over outsourcing has been morphing, and today there are growing numbers of people who think that what started as a sensible, globalized extension of sending some work outside a firm to specialized companies may in fact be creating long-term structural unemployment in the United States, hollowing out entire industries.
Since that time, improved technology and production know-how — everything from the telephone and the jet airplane to overnight delivery and just-in-time inventory control — have lowered transportation and coordination costs, making it efficient to move more and more work to outside suppliers and contractors.
Initially, a lot of outsourcing was to other American firms; later it involved moving production to foreign countries. Many companies rushed to spin off all but their most essential “core” activities.
Today, some of the world’s largest companies and biggest employers are the product of this outsourcing trend: Sodexo in food service; IBM in information technology; Wackenhut, now known as G4S, in security services; UPS and FedEx in logistics; Foxconn and Lenovo in computer manufacturing. Instead of the Rouge plant, the new model of industrial organization has become Nike, which outsources the making of all of its shoes, clothing and sporting equipment so it can concentrate on design and marketing, and Apple, which outsources all of its hardware manufacturing.
This editorial recognizes that over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital––which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor worker input and capital worker input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 235 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
But if fails to come to the logical conclusion that we, as a nation and particularly our leaders, need to recognize is that full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role––as the use of “machines,” superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc. to produce products and services.
Without a policy shift to broaden productive capital ownership simultaneously with economic growth, further development of technology and globalization will undermine the American middle class and make it impossible for more than a minority of citizens to achieve middle-class status.
President Obama stated: “What’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.” As long as working people are limited by earning income solely through their labor worker wages, they will be left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1 percent of the people that the system is rigged to benefit. These top 1 percent will seek out national and global markets to sell their products and services to and abandon any market that cannot sustain consumption.
Working people and the middle class will continue to stagnate, resulting in a stagnated consumer economy. More troubling is that this continued stagnation will further dim the economic hopes of America’s youth, no matter what their education level. The result will have profound long-term consequences for the nation’s economic health and further limit equal earning opportunity and spread income inequality. As the need for labor decreases and the power and leverage of productive capital increases, the gap between labor workers and capital owners will increase, which will result in upheaval.
The BIG ISSUE, which is the cause, is not being presented or discussed!! This solution is ENTIRELY missed by the author of the editorial.
Both Obama and Romney should realize that the continual focus on full employment means, “full toil and waste for all forever.” They need to address the question of how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (productive capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total products and services, and thus, how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?
The problem is that we simply do not have anyone presenting or discussing the central issue that I have been raising about how the system furthers concentrated ownership of productive capital economic growth, while leaving the vast majority of people essentially enslaved in labor tasks exponentially being destroyed or degraded by technological innovation and invention––the result of tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and the steady off-loading of American manufacturing and jobs.
Where is the media and academia who have remained silent on this pressing issue? Where are those leaders that can be supported for serving the public interest, and where is the money to mount presidential, senatorial, and congressional campaigns that won’t behold them to special interests? This is problematic!
Sadly, after a half-century, we have no leaders with a growth strategy that could restore the economic productiveness of the American economy. The growth strategy I have presented is not new, but it has not yet registered in the minds of leaderless politicians and their advisors from the left to the right of the political spectrum and a population of people who have been mis-educated and mis-led by conventional economists from all the conventional schools of economics. It is the ONLY growth strategy that will work to keep America competitive with the rest of the world.
WAKE-UP AMERICA!!
It should be obvious to every American that the continual focus on full employment job creation means, “full toil and waste for all forever.”
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
