The Freedomist
Labor Department, Hilda Solis, Labor Secretary, Business News, Economy, Freedom News, Obama News, Global Economy, Global Marketplace
Summary: The Labor Dept is turning to..the world, not America, to develop solutions for finding jobs for Americans. If the last couple of years has taught us anything it is that as long as we have leviathan International business entities linked together inexorably, when one part hiccups here, it causes collapses everywhere else.
The notion that global economics is more efficient than more independent national economies is a myth that began to emerge after World War Two and rapidly accelerated in the 80s and the 90s. Antitrust laws in the U.S were bent or ignored under the banner that “if we don’t allow our corporations to become larger, then we won’t be able to compete on the world stage”. Europe and the rest of the world has learned that such models have serious side effects, like the aforementioned one of connected failure.
Other side effects include the de facto endorsement of slave labor, or at least severely substandard labor practices, switching production to markets that offer little environmental protection standards, greatly decreased accountability (how do you hold a mega-corporation accountable when it has no central national base of operations?), and the dramatic decrease in innovation that occurs in near-monopolistic systems (which is what we have, and what the progressives want to move us further towards).
Despite all these negatives, Obama’s Labor Department, under Secretary Hilda Solis, seems ready to turn ever more for Global solutions to American problems.
Here is how the Labor Department is spinning this reliance on global solutions to American problems:
As we’ve learned, financial shocks can reverberate around the globe, but so can policies that create jobs, protect the rights of workers, and reward their hard work. If workers abroad have decent jobs and working conditions, they can afford to buy what they produce- and what U.S. workers produce. But if workers in other countries earn poverty wages in sweatshops, U.S. workers compete on a playing field where nobody wins. At the U.S. Department of Labor’s International Labor Affairs Bureau (ILAB), it’s our job to keep that from happening.
When the global economic crisis eliminated millions of jobs at home and abroad, we went into action. Secretary Solis hosted the first ever meeting of Labor and Employment Ministers from the G20 countries representing the largest economies in the world. The ministers rolled up their sleeves and agreed on recommendations for their leaders on how best to create and preserve jobs and what they can do to improve jobs in the future.
When our government negotiates free trade agreements, we insist that our trading partners pledge to respect labor rights. At ILAB we monitor whether those commitments are kept. This year, we filed our first case under the trade agreement between the U.S. and six Central American countries (called the CAFTA-DR) to ensure that the labor provisions in the agreement are enforced.
We are also expanding the path-breaking “Better Work” program that monitors working conditions in export factories in developing countries and reports the results on the internet. This gives accurate information to all concerned and ensures that companies that “do the right thing” get rewarded with more business, while firms that abuse workers do not. It’s a “win-win” proposition and governments and companies are lining up to participate.
One of our proudest achievements is what we do to protect the world’s most vulnerable workers: the millions of children who labor around the world, doing everything from stitching cloths to spraying pesticides to begging on the streets. We do exhaustive research every year on children working in the worst forms of child labor and fund projects worldwide to help remove children from harmful situations and get them into school – where they belong.
All that we do is part of our larger vision of a future where workers are treated fairly and can share in the prosperity they help to create. We work to build the global foundation of Secretary Solis’ vision of “good jobs for everyone.”
Sandra Polaski is Deputy Undersecretary of Labor for International Affairs
Tagged as: Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), Labor Day 2010, Workplace Rights
Workers of the World Unite! Does that sound like an American principle or a Marxist one? You guessed right if you went with Karl Marx.
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