The naive American

Frustrated with the constant bombardment facing our garment industry, I recently dashed off an e-mail to my friend Tina, who used to work for one of the Tan family factories.

“Were working conditions really that bad?” I asked her.

“Speaking of my own experience on Saipan,” she replied, “what I personally saw was not as awful as what I read in the Times magazine. There was wrongdoing in the factory –very wrong doings, like the supervisors’ attitude toward workers … but generally, most workers whom I know liked overtime, because that was what their most pay came from. Many of them did not mind working 60 hours a week.

“I always respect Willie as a decent businessman. It was never his intention to run sweatshops.

“By the way, the term “sweatshop” has an implication of living standard in it; sweatshops in some people’s standard may not be that bad for other people.

“Anyway, to me, some Americans are naive. There are many reasons behind this country’s policies, and one of them is that politicians have to do something to cater to those naive people.”

Well said indeed. The anti-CNMI propaganda largely stems from two factors: one, a deliberate US labor union conspiracy against us, and, two, the naiveté of the American public, particularly cause-hungry college students, to blindly go along.

The labor union agitators’ antics are well documented and easily exposed. They claim, for example, that CNMI textile factories are robbing Americans of their jobs.

Yet the facts prove quite otherwise. Including all of the advanced industrialized countries, America has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the entire world. At full employment (4.3%), America has the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years.

In fact, according to The Economist, at 4.3%, the United States has a lower unemployment rate than Italy (12%), France (11.5%), Germany (10.5%), Canada (7.8%), Australia (7.4%), Britain (6.3%), Sweden (5.4%), and, yes, even Japan (4.8%). Although I don’t have the official statistics before me, I would be willing to wager that the
US unemployment rate is lower than that of India, Pakistan, South Korea, Brazil, Russia, Thailand, and a whole host of many other countries around the world.

When the labor union rabble-rousers and their US congressmen-henchmen attack the CNMI for taking away American jobs, they are really attacking the CNMI for taking
away a narrow segment of a domestically obsolete American manufacturing sector–a very small portion of a much larger, growing American economy.

The labor union thugs have always claimed to be looking out for the working man–for the greatest benefit to the entire labor force. We see now that they are lying. They don’t care about net job creation, about job creation as a whole. They care only about protecting weak, vulnerable, obsolete, dispensable, narrow industries–
America’s past, not America’s grander, bolder high-tech future.

The problem is that far too many naive Americans appear willing to go along with this backward labor union agenda. Most Americans don’t understand the benefits of free trade and the basic principle of comparative advantage that gives rise to it. They can’t see that trade deficits really don’t matter, and that free trade agreements like NAFTA have only accelerated U.S. job creation.

We sell American consumers high quality clothing at competitive prices. (It is, so far, besides land for the US military, all that we are able to sell.) We, in turn, make money and buy all sorts of American products: Colgate-Palmolive, Listerine, Spam, Proctor and Gamble, Ford, Dell, Gateway, Time-Warner, America-online, IBM, you name it.

Americans should not be so naive. They should fully realize that many other nationals are not as lucky as they are–and that the only way for the people of the CNMI, local and non-resident alike, to achieve their great prosperity is to practice precisely the kind of free enterprise-oriented free trade that their labor unions are now desperately trying to deny us.