[Kadin]

> what other ways do we have of increasing the bargaining position of labor?

You tighten the labor market.

It's not coincidental that unions, which depend on a tight labor market for a bargaining position (striking is fundamentally their real weapon), have been on a downhill trend since basically the same time that trade laws were changed to favor capital, via removing barriers to both foreign labor and foreign trade. In some cases the labor supply is slackened by bringing in more workers, in some cases by just offshoring production to a place where the labor market is already slack.

Most of the reasons used to justify this were related to the West's perceived existential struggle against Communism: it was necessary to open the door to China trade because that was a wedge against the Soviets; NAFTA was necessary to secure America's standing "as world champion of the free-market cause" (ref. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/09/business/worldbusiness/09i...) as a hedge against an increasingly multipolar world in the 1990s; continued rounds of deals, up until very recently with the failure of the TPP, have always been justified similarly.

Though I am not intimately familiar with Canadian politics historically, I assume that the justifications there were similar (and with significant arm-twisting from their southern neighbor).

Intriguingly, the necessary sacrifices for American leadership (let's not call it 'hegemony'), in the form of the cost of economic subsidies to Western allies necessary to keep them toeing the free market line, have always seemed to fall on American -- and Canadian, apparently -- workers, and benefited businesses and business owners. Workers are constantly reassured that, despite appearances, these deals have been good for the country, and somehow by extension also them personally, but this explanation is starting to wear thin, as it becomes more and more apparent that the gains have gone to a small portion of the country at the expense of a great many. The gig is seemingly up.

Pro-trade, pro-business parties (such as the British Columbia Liberal Party, mentioned in the article as a recipient of donations from the factory owners) should take note of the current state of the US Republican Party, and take steps not to overplay their hand. While the gains made by businesses and capital owners at the expense of industrial workers are impressive, history suggests that going down this road too far leads to what we might politely call a "disruptive overcorrection", either to the political hard right or hard left. In the US, we have seen this frustration elect the first unashamed populist and trade skeptic of the modern era (well, at least, someone the electorate apparently thought was a populist; time will tell); if things had gone a bit differently we might have gotten free-trade skepticism in the form of a Socialist (Sanders).

The current path, or just telling workers in the industrialized world to suck it up until they hit wage parity with the developing world, is not sustainable. Governments that try may find themselves replaced by governments that don't.

[_5ysi]

I couldn't agree more with everything you have said here!

On the justifications for opening international trade, I believe, contrarily, that Nixon was one of the greatest president of the 20th century and that opening trade with China was a most important decision affecting humanity's survival. But since then, government policy has seemed blind to the fact that the working class has been paying all of the costs.

I agree we need to do something in the meantime, before global prosperity is able to rise close enough to our own. Conveniently, I also think the current organization of global fiat currencies is exacerbating the effects of globalization on American workers and preventing them from benefiting from technological advances which would otherwise be minimizing the problem. If we could get our government spending under control, then set the target inflation rate to zero, and even be unafraid of minor deflation caused by manufacturing and efficiency improvements...this would do a lot to blunt the growing inequality between existing wealth and work. Trade deficits financed by fiat currency would have a supply/demand correction if we didn't provide so many short circuits for reserve note capital to return to the US.