Discussion

Campaigning to “Protect Jobs” Leads to a Dead End

Trade unions in industries facing plant closures and layoffs almost invariably launch campaigns to convince governments and the public that the jobs of their members should be preserved through one or another form of government subsidy. These campaigns always look at the issue of protecting jobs in a very narrow way that covers up the real consequences of subsidizing the monopoly capitalists in the name of “job protection”.

Since these campaigns usually take place within the context of fierce international competition between monopolies, the first consequence is to line up the workers of one country against the workers in another country. Clearly, within conditions of a global crisis of overproduction, if jobs are saved in one country they must be eliminated in another country. As a result these campaigns instil workers with a spirit of national chauvinism in which the workers of other countries are viewed as the enemy rather than the monopoly capitalists of all countries.

Furthermore, these campaigns do not just divide workers along international lines; they also divide the working class nationally on the basis of supporting one group of monopoly capitalists or another. This is because these campaigns are conducted in an ideological vacuum, with no consideration being paid to the fact that every industry exists within both a national and an international capitalist economy.

For example, the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW) union has called for increased trade protection and government handouts for the “Canadian” automobile manufacturers in order to save the jobs of autoworkers. Of course, autoworkers have a right to jobs, but so does every other worker. However, since auto manufacturing exists within a real economy where resources are finite, any increase in subsidies to the auto manufacturers must come from somewhere. That somewhere may be decreased subsidies for other sectors of the economy with a corresponding loss of jobs in those sectors. Or, as is more likely, it can come from cutbacks in spending in the public sector (health, education, social services) with corresponding jobs losses in those sectors.

Other proposed measures, such as trade barriers, represent a different form of subsidy -one that comes out of the pockets of consumers by reducing competition and, thereby, keeping prices artificially high. If consumers are paying more for the protected commodity (such as cars), then they will have less disposable income to spend on other commodities (such as, say, refrigerators). Profits in those other sectors will then decline and the monopoly capitalists in those sectors will respond by laying off workers there.

The complexity of these issues is illustrated by a situation that has developed in the paper industry. The U.S. has imposed countervailing duties on imports of coated paper from China, South Korea and Indonesia, citing the “dumping” of coated paper from those countries on the American market. This was initiated as a result of a complaint from a large U.S.-based manufacturer of coated paper. The Printing Industries of America, representing printers in the U.S., has called for the American government to end the countervailing duties because it is driving up the price that they have to pay for coated paper in the U.S., making it more difficult for them to compete with foreign printers.

What stand should workers take on such an issue? Clearly, the dumping of cheap Asian paper on the American market will have a negative impact on manufacturing jobs in the pulp and paper industry. However, imposing countervailing duties on those Asian imports has a negative impact on manufacturing jobs in the printing sector. Furthermore, since printers in other countries will step in to fill the void, it is not even clear that the American paper manufacturers will sell any more paper than they were before the duties were imposed. Depending on how much business is diverted elsewhere it could possibly be even less and could actually lead to a further reduction in jobs in the U.S. paper industry. On the other hand, the pulp and paper capitalists may very well benefit in the short term because the revenues from countervailing duties are usually turned over directly to the capitalists to replace their “lost” profits.

The practice of erecting tariff barriers to protect domestic industries worked to an extent a century ago because most capitalist economies were still organized on a national basis, transportation was slower and capital was less mobile. However, today this is no longer the case. Small capitalists may still have difficulty dealing in international markets, but the big capitalists have no such problem. They have become extremely adept at outsourcing production to anywhere in the world where the price is cheaper.

As a result, campaigns to “protect jobs” through government subsidies or trade barriers, at best, merely shift the problem onto workers in some other sector or some other region or some other part of the world. They do nothing to solve the underlying problem because the underlying problem is created by the laws of the capitalist system itself. If the trade unions were to acknowledge this reality, then they would come under pressure from workers to provide real alternatives to capitalism, something that very few trade union leaders are prepared to do.