America Has Become a Third World Source of Labor and Slum Landlord Ownership for Europe

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12718

What a startling contrast between the jingoistic exhortations of "American Exceptionalism" and the reality that we have become a third world source of labor and slum landlord ownership for Europe.

That's the take of Harold Meyerson in The Los Angeles Times, who writes of a shocking reality behind the US economic decline. After describing how Deutsche Bank has become one of Los Angeles' newest large slumlords, Meyerson drops a bombshell:

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."


More at the link --

The Chinese pay considerably more and provide better working conditions than US companies in a lot of professions. As a 23 year airline pilot, I can make about 50 percent more and have more time at home by going to work for a Chinese airline. My new wife is an administrative attorney with 20 years experience who has been unemployed for 6 months. The best offer she's gotten in the US is $17 per hour with no benefits. A Chinese company just offered her four times that amount with a full benefits package. My nephew is working as a teacher over there right now and is making more than 20 year teachers here.

I think a lot of my immediate family, all trained and experienced professionals, will be leaving the US for better opportunities elsewhere within the next 5 years. America is no longer the best place to live and work, if it ever was.

I bet they are bragging about our docile compliant workforce all around the world

for multinationals. It isn't just Euro companies - increasingly, U.S. assets are owned abroad, and so-called US-based corporations are more like Liberian-flagged ships - the registration is a flag of convenience, while the controlling ownership is actually held by banks in Bern or Shanghai or global equity funds of no particular nationality. The American Century is over. Get ready for a middling sort of existence and ever-greater inequality.

Once that sort of shift was allowed to occur, there's not a whole lot (politically or legally) you can do to change it.

I knew Chinese wages were increasing but "soaring"? Likewise, there is definitely rising labor unrest in China, but far more strikes there than here?

I wonder if the European companies (and others) mentioned in the OP have located manufacturing in the US to produce goods that are destined for the US market or for export back to Europe or elsewhere in the world. Either way it will be interesting to see how European workers react to the outsourcing of their jobs to the US.