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LOS ANGELES -- There is nothing like having a job. Your life has
structure (maybe even meaning), you can put food on the table, and
you may even have enough money left over for a movie, dinner or
vacation.
There is also nothing quite like not having a job. You have nowhere
to go and nothing to do, you can’t look your family in the
eye, and you can’t afford those little extras.
Unemployment rivals threats like SARS and perhaps even Al Qaeda
in the fear it strikes in the hearts of global men and women. For
them -- Muslim, Hindu, Christian or Jew -- joblessness is the true
homeland insecurity.
Though the overall picture is not yet terrifying, developed economies
report little job growth. The largest, the United States, has had
to endure seven straight months of employment decline. One now sees
job-loss-fear in the eyes of people in successful Singapore, for
decades accustomed to near-invisible unemployment. One sees the
fear in Hong Kong -- once a near-nirvana of jobs.
‘‘Jobless syndrome’’ was at the heart of
the cacophony at Cancun, where the ministers of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) recently had a big meeting that dramatically
fell apart. It was the WTO’s second major meltdown. The first
occurred in the 1999 ‘‘Battle of Seattle,’’
when anti-globalization street demonstrations all but closed down
the summit. That scene was repeated in the lovely Mexican resort
city hosting some 150 or so national delegations.
The point of global free trade is to generate more jobs and more
wealth for all nations. But the conference broke up like a bad marriage,
with more finger-pointing than consensus. The killer issue was farm
subsidies: import taxes or tax-relief benefits that governments
hand farmers to protect their home-grown produce from being under-priced
by imported produce. Such protectionism is particularly rampant
in France, Japan and the United States.
The point of subsidies is to protect existing jobs; the ambition
of globalization is to create new jobs. The worldwide economy is
now in equipoise between the conservatism of protectionism and the
liberalism of globalization.
Some high-profile jobs were on the line, too. After all, the leaders
of the rich countries don’t want to lose their jobs. And so
the U.S. delegation resisted lowering tariffs on various imports
so farmers and ranchers would not lose their jobs in market openings.
If they did, they might not vote for the reelection of President
George W. Bush, and so he would lose his job. Ditto Japan (rice
farmers and the ruling Liberal Democratic Party are two peas in
a pod) -- and many others.
In the poor countries, the politicians’ goal is to keep their
jobs by creating new jobs, not saving existing ones, those being
in short supply anyway. But the poor can’t gain unless the
rich give up something. And that didn’t happen. The rich were
in no such mood.
That’s why the Cancun collapse highlighted two serious problems.
The first is the ethical issue of our increasingly interlaced global
village. Is it morally right for rich countries to maintain (if
not increase) their level of wealth if the poor are left behind?
Is a resource-distribution system that doesn’t benefit those
who are the least well-off in any sense moral -- or in the final
analysis even functional?
The second issue concerns China. At Cancun, Beijing positioned itself
at the center of the so-labeled G22, a new group of ‘‘emerging’’
economies that includes, notably, India. The G22 balked at the measly
concessions on agricultural issues offered by the rich. But China
has based much of its recent economic policy on its commitment to
globalization, and meeting the requirements of WTO membership has
caused unnerving levels of social dislocation and unemployment on
the mainland.
For example, wives are waving goodbye to husbands who migrate from
rural homes and farms for New Age jobs located in the richer coastal
cities. Sometimes the jobs are there, sometimes not; the women remain
behind, forced to take up the economic slack with a second or even
third job (if such menial tasks exist). An honest poll of women
in rural China would probably not show great support for the WTO.
Accordingly, Beijing itself may lose enthusiasm for the WTO (the
outside motor for much-needed modernization in China) if the organization
continues its dive. Connecting the dots between Seattle and Cancun
hardly inspires confidence. Having made the epochal decision just
a few years ago to buy into the WTO, the Chinese may now be wondering
exactly what they have bought into. The Cancun collapse had to be
especially unsettling to the leaders of the most populous nation.
If the WTO experiment proves a failure, they could lose their jobs.
In China, it’s happened before.
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The above weekly column has just appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser,
The South China Morning Post and The Straits Times of Singapore.
The author, Tom Plate, is a regular columnist at these three papers.
The column also appears in other world newspapers, including The
San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, The Japan Times and
The Korea Times. Email him at: tplate@ucla.edu.
For publication
and reprint rights, contact the author directly or John Simpson
(john.simpson@latsi.com) of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate International. |
