Oceanview said "those 25000 GM workers who lose their auto jobs, they are going to be able to find other jobs at the same pay level. right?" That doesn't have anything to do with % of the labor force, it was a question about those GM employees.
As always, you and yours ignore the social costs that society has to pick up and pay, that out weigh the few dollars saved.
You and yours ignore the fact that despite job losses in the furniture industry, average real hourly wages have still risen since NAFTA.
How are the median wages, what is the distribution of these wages (across different types of jobs), what about people without the wages and how is the cost of living?
Have you adjusted that for the top 10%? Or the top 5%? Or the top 2% ouliers? Oh or don't we know enough about Statistics to understand that radical outliers will skew the whole average? Or maybe you do and don't feel like seeing the real results? I'm betting on the last.
1994-2004 Wage Facts:
For all workers, hourly wages rose 38.4% while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) just rose 27.1%, hence the real gain. For manufacturing jobs, hourly wages also rose more than prices, with a 34.1% gain.
Of course the protectionists will explain this away by claiming that the increases weren't enough and don't mean much.....until you look at pre-NAFTA wage increases decreases.
a pre-NAFTA comparison is in order. From 1984-1994, hourly wages for all workers rose 33.5%, while the CPI rose 42.2%, indicating a fall in real wages. The same happened for manufacturing jobs with hourly wages rising only 33%, well under the rise in prices. So it looks like workers did better in the years after NAFTA went into effect than before.
Isn't construction one of the industries where protectionists say wages are being driven lower since NAFTA (wage arbitrage) by the free traders? hmmmmmmm.....
we gained about 2 million construction jobs from 1994-2004, which paid well. In 2004, the average hourly wage for construction workers was $19.23. Construction wages also showed real gains from 1994-2004 while showing losses in the 1984-94 pre-NAFTA period.