Europe is scarred by long term unemployment with countries pressured to cut back worker benefits. Here in the United States, inequality has been rising, and families pay the price while men and women work longer and harder in jobs that offer fewer benefits and less security. For working families in this country, the global economy is not an abstraction. Many jobs are dependent on exports. Many are lost to imports.
Employers routinely use the threat to move abroad as a club in contract negotiations.
Last year's global financial collapse produced tremors on Wall Street but trauma in Pittsburgh. Even with the economy growing, the U.S. lost more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs over the last 18 months as devastated countries tried to export their way out of trouble. Seated here with me today is one of the workers I'm talking about. John Folk and 1,100 other workers were employed at the Huffy Corp. bike factory in Celina, Ohio, where they built the best bikes in the world for a company that was making a profit. But last year, the Huffy bike company decided to shut down their prosperous plant to move to a less efficient plant in Mexico and import more bikes from China, where workers are not allowed to organize together to lift their standards.