February 23, 2008
Winners and Losers
NAM's Shopfloor.org blog writes up an interesting "60 Minutes" piece from this last weekend about how Caterpillar is thriving amid a globalizing economy. Too often in government economic policy (and far too often on Lou Dobbs' show) we focus on stories about the "giant sucking sound," the closed factories, and the jobs heading overseas. We don't look closely at places like Caterpillar or companies like Tony Raimondo's Behlen Manufacturing, whose Chinese subsidiary and overseas growth has helped to employ more workers in Behlen's Columbus, Nebraska headquarters. In fact, the steel from Behlen's Chinese team, will make up this summer's Beijing Olympics basketball pavilion. That's pretty cool for the workers in Columbus, but it's not a big headline on the economic pages.
This is, in essence, the heart of a major problem for presidential candidates in the 2008 race: As the global market expands, it’s easy to see the losers—the shuttered factories, abandoned parking lots, and headlines of more pink slips. It’s harder to see the winners. A worker can’t see the new markets opening up overseas, and few noticed the founding in a dorm room by Michael Dell of the soon-to-be computer giant Dell—which has provided jobs for 78,000 employees and brings in nearly $60 billion in revenue a year. Since new companies and new jobs are harder to see, workers tend to focus on the negative economic changes they can see. "You know who you are if you’re going to lose a job. You don’t know who you are if you’re about to gain a job," explains Pat Cleary, a longtime executive at the National Association of Manufacturers. "People can really play on those fears."
If Barack Obama wants to really build a general election campaign on hope, I hope that he takes an optimistic view of the U.S. economy and its role in today's world—and understands that the more we can develop overseas the better it'll be for workers back here. He recently gave a major economic speech in Wisconsin and while much of the focus was on things like credit cards and bankruptcies, I hope that as more policy proposals come out we'll see that Obama's capable of a more nuanced view of the global economy than either John Kerry or John Edwards was in 2004. Edwards and Kerry helped to torpedo Raimondo's chance to become the U.S. manufacturing czar when they attacked his Chinese operation—failing to understand that creating jobs in China can also create jobs here in the United States. After all, today's landscape is anything but a zero sum economy.
UPDATE: Here's another interesting look at GE's experience and the benefits of the global economy.
