Working for 33 Cents an Hour – 11-1-2006

Would you go to work each day if you were paid only 33 cents per hour? Employes of the Huffy Bicycle Company do so each day.
As you may have guessed, the factory is now located in China. Huffy decided to close its factory in Ohio, fire all 900 workers, and move the factory to China.
This and other horrifying stories of outsourcing America’s jobs to low-wage countries are contained in a book enti-tled “Take This Job and Ship It, How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics are Selling Out America.”
The book is written by Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat from North Dakota, who has served in Congress for the past 24 years.
On the last day of work in Ohio, Huffy employes left their shoes in the parking lot to illustrate the point, “You can move our jobs to China but you are not going to be able to fill our shoes.”
Huffy dumped all 1,800 of its em-ployes in three states. The Chinese Huffy workers make 33 cents per hour; work 12 to 15 hours per day, seven days per week.
They live in barracks and are given only two meals a day.
I hear people say, “We can’t compete in the global marketplace without outsourcing.” Is that what it takes to compete, a form of slavery?
Wal-Mart is given the credit for Huffy moving to China, according to Dorgan, because it demanded cheaper and cheaper bicycles.
The CEO of Huffy was paid $871,000 the year he shut down American factories.
A former Huffy employe in Ohio, a 64-year old woman, made $11 an hour. Now she makes $7 an hour stocking the breakfast bar at a Holiday Inn.
Here is the kicker on the Huffy Bicy-cle story, it has filed for bankruptcy and reneged on its pension plan and announced it will become a Chinese-owned company.
Dorgan notes America’s largest export by volume is now wastepaper, headed mostly for China. That’s scrap paper, not cars, TVs, computers, shirts, shoes, or construction materials.
He notes America has a trade deficit of over $700 billion, the highest in history. Don’t forget our $1.2 trillion budget deficit.
In 1970, this country’s largest em-ployer was General Motors. Now it is Wal-Mart, where the average yearly salary is $18,000 per year.
In the past five years, America has lost over 3 million jobs, writes Dorgan.
“The big picture is this: slowly but surely, in the race for short-term prof-its, America’s manufacturing base is being dismantled,” said Dorgan.
He notes it was manufacturing that allowed this country to retool swiftly and defeat Germany and Japan in World War II.
Who are losing jobs thanks to “free trade” agreements?
Dorgan said it is the steelworker in Pittsburgh, the coal miner in West Vir-ginia, the craftsman in Minnesota, the textile worker in Georgia, the metal fabricator in Ohio and the American farmer.
Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board said he calculates between 42 and 56 million jobs could be sent overseas.
Dorgan asks the question, if the middle class is eliminated in America by outsourcing jobs, who will buy all the products imported from overseas?
General Electric fired nearly 500 workers from its refrigerator plant in Bloomington, Ind. in 2005. The em-ployes were told GE planned to discon-tinue production of mid line side-by-side refrigerators when in truth, GE was moving the jobs to a factory in Mexico.
By the way, GE received a $3-million loan from our government to build their new factory in Mexico.
The list goes on and on. IBM fired 13,000 workers in the U.S. and Europe and hired 14,000 workers in India, wrote Dorgan. Fig Newton cookies are now baked in Mexico.
Dorgan notes the Bush administra-tion counts flipping burgers at McDonalds as manufacturing jobs in economic reports.