For those of you interested in U.S. organized labor's "new direction"
under the Sweeney/Trumka leadership, see the article in today's _NYT_
about the labor bosses paying a visit to the Boeing strike in Everett,
WA. Renewed militancy, perhaps, but with a woefully protectionist
twist. What is one of the targets of the machinists' strike ? For
Boeing to halt the contracting out of parts assembly to offshore sites,
even though many of these offshore operations reflect attempts by
various developmentalist states to force Boeing to purchase parts from
firms in countries to which it exports commerical aircraft. So what is
U.S. organized labor's grand vision of an alternative ? For _all_
manufacturing activity to take place in the First World ?
And then there's the full-page ad put together by various Puerto Rican-
American elected officials demanding that the Clinton Administration retain
"Operation Bootstrap," the program that gives tax breaks to U.S. corporations
who site manufacturing facilities in Puerto Rico.
Ah, yes, the sharp theory and practice of U.S. "progressives." One camp
wants to keep all the high-value jobs and incomes to itself, the other
wants to help U.S. transnationals, which probably have among the highest
profit margins in the world, with taxpayer assistance to locate in an
area where they would probably locate anyway ...
John Gulick
