READ:
Could your job go to China?
While U.S. employment leaps ...
September 7, 2001 Posted: 12:07 PM EDT (1607 GMT)
[http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/09/06/china.trade.jobs/index.html]
By Porter Anderson
CNN Career(CNN) -- Just as Friday's new Labor Department report shows the United States unemployment rate soaring in August to 4.9 percent from 4.6 percent, a newly released, federally funded study reveals that a significant number of production jobs are shifting from the American workplace to China.
Labor Department statistics suggest that U.S. employers cut far more jobs in August than private economists had anticipated -- 113,000 non-farm positions. And this is after American layoffs passed the 1-million mark in July.
But what concerns Stephanie Luce, Ph.D., about her research data is not just her figure of at least 34,900 jobs -- and maybe twice that -- moving from the States to China in a seven-month period as a result of warming Washington-Beijing trade relations.
"What makes it worse," she says, "is that some of these are higher-wage jobs, the type jobs that U.S. cities have been fighting to win. And now they're leaving. Many of those jobs were held by people who'd been working in them for many years, and in some cases their whole lifetimes."
QUESTIONS:
AFTER READING, WHAT DO YOU THINK?Should the US use trade restrictions to protect American jobs?
- What is YOUR answer to this question? YES / NO
- How would most economists answer this question? YES / NO
- According to economic studies which of the following is true for countries that restrict trade?
- The benefits of trade restrictions are much greater than their costs
- The costs of trade restrictions are much greater than the benefits
- If YOU answered NO to the first question, how do you reconcile your answer with the news article above? OR what could be done instead of trade restrictions?