Proponents of globalization claim it provides answers to many of the world’s economic problems. But while transnational corporate giants rake in increasingly higher profits, workers’ lives have been devastated worldwide.
U.S.-based corporations have increasingly been shifting production overseas, enabling them to reap dramatically
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At the end of 2006, international earnings from offshore sales and exports of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index increased 45.2 percent, up from 32.2 percent in 2001.
The 10 companies with the largest foreign sales last year were some of the biggest names in U.S. business, including ExxonMobil, Ford Motor Company and General Electric.
“Corporate profit growth is going to do better than it would have done if these companies had ignored the opportunities elsewhere,” economist Nigel Gault told the New York Times in a July 7 article titled “Haves and have-nots of globalization.”
What Gault means is this: Corporations can make more money by super-exploiting workers in oppressed countries than by keeping all their investments in the United States. These “opportunities,” however, only benefit the imperialists.
Globalization is part and parcel of imperialism’s domination of the world economy. Imperialist countries, like the United States, Japan, Britain, France and Germany, export capital whenever and wherever they can in order to increase market share and profits.
Under the direction of imperialist-created institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, governments in oppressed countries have sold off publicly owned industries and assets at rock bottom prices to private corporations.
And after the overthrow of the socialist bloc from 1989-1991, the United States aggressively began negotiating “free trade” agreements around the world. Oppressed countries had few alternative trading partners and many were forced to negotiate with the U.S. government under highly unfavorable terms.
The North American Free Trade Agreement opened the Mexican economy to competition with heavily subsidized U.S. corporations and eliminated protective tariffs.
The impact on workers has been devastating. From 1991 to 1998, Mexican wages decreased by 27 percent, hourly income decreased by 40 percent and the minimum wage lost half of its purchasing power.
NAFTA has hurt U.S. workers too. All 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have suffered a net job loss due to NAFTA. Figures range from 395 jobs lost in Alaska to 44,132 in California.
Capitalist globalization has allowed U.S. employers to reduce workers’ wages and benefits and forced workers in oppressed countries to take low-paying jobs in their home country or emigrate to survive.
The only “haves” of globalization are the rich capitalists. It is time for the rest of us, the “have-nots,” to globalize the struggle against capitalism and change the equation.
