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Mollie's job moved from New Jersey to Mississippi and Arkansas and eventually to a Maquiladora in Matamoros, Mexico.
In 1955, Mollie James began her three-decade stint on the assembly line at Universal Manufacturing. The firm was founded in 1947 by Archie Sergy, an entrepreneur with a questionable past. The firm eventually opened another plant in Simpson County, Mississippi, in the early 1960s. Building on a longstanding commitment to increase industrialization, the state lured Universal by offering to transfer the cost of building a new plant to the taxpayer. The move south was a preview of what was to happen in the 1980s when a leveraged buyout put the firm in new, more cost-conscious, hands.
As locations were continuously competing to attract new firms, the Mexican government made plant relocation attractive by offering tax-free zones, cheap labor, and a willingness to clamp down on union organizers. Mexican manufacturing paid their workers so little that they were forced to provide food to their employees in some cases because they could not feed themselves with their compensation...
The flow of capital had allowed companies to move across boarders freely. Some factories were even being moved within Mexico, as companies followed the lowest wages and labor resources to their lowest possible point.
Discussion
This was not inevitable, or at least wouldn't have been inevitable, if proper "rules of the game" had been set up. The move was probably harmful overall, because it only ended up destroying jobs in the U.S. while exploiting workers like Balbina Duque in Mexico. Economic orthodoxy would have us believe that economic globalization and free trade have no downside. Yet journalist and author Adler (Land of Opportunity) reminds us that these sweeping economic changes do have a human cost and his book recounts the rise and fall of an electrical manufacturing company through the eyes of its founders, workers, and the politicians, union organizers, and corporate raiders who shape its fate (Stewart, N.d.).
There are obviously opposing views on such an issue; however there must be some mechanisms that level the playing field in…
Works Cited
Horn, H. (2011). The burden of proof in trade disputes and the environment. Journal of Evironmental Economics and Management, 15-29.
Stewart, D. (N.d.). Mollie's Job. Retrieved from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Mollies-Job-Story-Global-Assembly/dp/0743200306
Mollie's Job The viewpoint expressed in (b) is the closest to the way this paper will be presented. Indeed the roles that Wall Street (profit first, workers be damned) and the U.S. government played in this nonfiction book are the main reasons why Mollie's job was moved first to Mississippi and then to Mexico. To be sure, this sad legacy could have ended up with a more positive result for Mollie
Adler reveals that poverty is systemic: a sign of a corrupt system. Mollie James' and Balbina Duque's only chance of extricating themselves from poverty is to inject more political power and energy back into the formation of labor unions. The power of the people to overcome and overthrow corrupt regimes has been proven time and again throughout human history; the struggle is not an easy one but there is no
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Bell, Carolyn Shaw. (1995). What is Poverty? The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 54(2) 161-173. Shaw takes the position that the very definition of "poverty level" -- defined in 1965 by Mollie Orshanksy, an economist with the Social Security department -- was originally used "as the percentage of income necessary to buy a nutritious diet" (Bell, 1995, p. 1). Bell goes on later in the article to refer to