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Your Quote: Fact: Nations are losing manufacturing jobs worldwide, even China.

You free traitors are so full of it. Yeah china may be loosing manufacturing jobs due to better production but so many companies are moving over there the unemployed are immediatly rehired. See the FR post below.

Help Wanted: China Finds Itself With a Labor Shortage

Posted by neverdem
On News/Activism 04/03/2005 2:42:43 PM PDT · 56 replies · 1,031+ views

Help Wanted: China Finds Itself With a Labor Shortage

May not be as rosy as you think:

"Over the past ten years, bloated state-owned enterprises and “collectives” (most of them in effect also state-owned) have shed much of their excess labour. Many have been simply closed. Between 1998 and 2002, such closures resulted in job losses for a staggering 24m workers, or about 10% of the urban labour force, by government reckoning."

"The closures continue. Official newspapers reported this month that more big layoffs are imminent at some of the country's state-owned commercial banks, which have already shed some 250,000 staff and closed 45,000 offices since the late 1990s. The government says some 2,500 state-owned mines and large enterprises with a total staff of 5.1m are due to be shut in the coming four years."

"China ignores rural areas when calculating unemployment figures in the belief that, since villagers enjoy land-use rights, they can make a living. Even so, 150m or so rural-dwellers have little or nothing to do and in the coming years may move to urban areas. This vast reservoir will add to urban employment pressures just as China faces a baby-boom surge in the labour force and, thanks to heavy investment in capital-intensive production, diminishing employment gains from growth. “Socialist” China will have its work cut out."

Economist China employment

This is also appropriate for those who think all is well in China:

Forbes

The article is a couple of years old but the conclusions are right on.

Put in a global evolutionary context, the loss of 2.6 million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. since the start of 2001 looks far less ominous -- at least to folks not seeking elective office. Facts about the extent of the decline in global manufacturing jobs would demolish the economic (not the political) argument for protectionist measures. Both houses of Congress have proposed legislation that would impose stiff tariffs on Chinese imports.

"Facts about human capital's decreasing relevance in the manufacturing process would expose the silliness of appointing a manufacturing czar, an initiative announced recently by President George W. Bush. They would upend the misplaced notion that China's undervalued currency -- the yuan has been pegged at 8.3 to the dollar for almost a decade -- is giving the country's manufacturers' a competitive edge and ballooning its trade surplus with the U.S. to $103 billion in 2002."

"No reasonable degree of yuan appreciation could offset the labor-cost differential between the two countries. U.S. manufacturing workers make about 25 times what an average Chinese factory worker earns, according to statistical agencies in the U.S. and China."

The fact that China is losing factory jobs at a faster rate than the countries from which it is supposedly stealing them just might put to rest the notion of China, job thievery nation.

I never put much faith in the belief that unpegging the yuan would be a panacea for the American worker.

So Who's Stealing China's Manufacturing Jobs?