NOuSeCON6MKAS Dezembro '07 / (44/53)
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One can read the experience of the Carolina textile industries, therefore, as a story of intense
recent competition as globalization accelerates. Or, with equal validity, one can read it as the
story of an experiment in preserving the high tariffs of the early 20th century in the world of the
late 20th and early 21 st.
Either way, the structural and policy factors promoting globalization have had powerful effects.
For the American managing a family budget, many changes are for the better. Our Bureau of
Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey shows that in 1950 Americans spent 40 cents on
each dollar of earnings on food and clothes. By 1973 this dropped to 27 cents per dollar, and in
2005 it was 13 cents on the dollar. Thus, on average, America’s modern families are far more
affluent than those of a generation or two ago, after shifting a seventh of their income from the
necessities of life into education, entertainment, household amenities, personal computers, and
so on.
But Americans are also workers. Many are factory workers; and as we have seen, North
Carolina’s factory workers were concentrated heavily in lower-skilled light manufacturing. Here
the effects have been very challenging. Tariffs or not, Dr. Rivoli observes, garment-industry work
has flowed out of the American south to poorer countries, just as it once flowed from New
England to North Carolina. Textile businesses, especially in the clothing sector, began moving
out of the wealthy world into Asia during the 1950s and 1960s; the flow accelerated during the
1970s and 1980s, and continues to this day.
Many identify these trends as part of a general decline of manufacturing in the United States.
This is mistaken. Factory industry remains a very large part of American economic life, though it
is now a smaller employer and more concentrated in capital-intensive, high-tech fields. Some
national statistics illustrate the trends:
- Production : American factory output - measured as a share of the US economy, or as a share
of world manufacturing - has changed relatively little. America’s share of world manufacturing
output has remained fairly steady over the past three decades, at about 20% of world output.
Within the US economy, the same is true; in real dollars, manufacturing has a 13.6% share of
GDP, roughly the same as the 13.3% figure the Bureau of Economic Analysis records for 1987.
But the type of goods made in the United States have changed significantly. Textiles and
clothes accounted for about six percent of American output in 1987; now they are two percent,
with capital - and technology-intensive products like IT goods and medical equipment taking
their place.
- Job availability : Faithfully reflecting Hamilton’s ideas on competition with lower-wage countries,
factory managers have replaced workers with machines. American factory employment peaked
at 35% percent of the workforce in the 1950s, and in total terms at 19.6 million in 1979. Now
the figures are about 11% of the workforce and 14 million workers. For the textile and clothing
industry the drop has been much faster - from 2.4 million in the early 1970s, to about 500,000
today. And in this decade, the exodus from factory work has been remarkably fast.
In January of 2001, American factories employed 17.3 million people. By December of 2003,
after a recession, the figure had fallen to 14.2 million workers. In effect, three million people left
factory jobs and moved ... somewhere else. Since then, with the economic recovery, job loss has
slowed but not stopped. Despite a strong recovery in dollar terms, factories continue to shed
about 90,000 jobs a year; and even in their shrunken state, the textile and clothing businesses
account for five thousand of these monthly job losses.
- Pay : Factory work also now pays less relative to other businesses than it did in the past. In
1987 the typical manufacturing worker earned about 7% more per hour than the typical worker
overall. Now the manufacturing worker makes about 1% less per hour. This is all the more
striking when one considers that manufacturing is shifting from lower-skilled light-industry
toward fields like information technology, medical equipment and other very sophisticated
goods.