As corporations have developed their ability to tap into a huge global labor pool, they have less need for the social welfare policies of any particular nation. Global companies may want various kinds of subsidies from the government, but when it comes to government regulations that could allow the people to exert control over big business, corporate ideology preaches "free trade," deregulation and the downsizing of government. The possibility of a truly democratic government is the most serious threat to the power of large corporations-so government must be dismantled!

With a global labor pool at their disposal, transnational corporations are less dependent on any particular national workforce. The facts show that in recent decades U.S. corporations have been cutting jobs here while expanding employment abroad. And the percentage of their total profits that derive from overseas operations has been rising sharply.

The old dictum, "What's good for General Motors is good for America" has a hollow ring in an age of globalization and corporate downsizing. After laying off more than 70,000 workers since 1993, General Motors now ranks as the wealthiest U.S. corporation, raking in more than $168 billion in revenues in 1995 alone-that's equal to the annual wages of more than 19 million Americans earning the minimum wage.

The increasing globalization of U.S. corporations gives them the leverage to hold down wages and resist unionization. Average real wages (corrected for inflation) have been falling since the early 1970s. By 1992, average weekly earnings in the private, non-agricultural part of the U.S. economy were 19 percent below their peak in the early 1970s. Nearly one-fourth of the U.S. workforce now earns less in real terms than the 1968 minimum wage! The trend toward less unionization is evident in the third graph below, which shows a steady decline in union membership since the 1950s. This is a chicken-and-egg relationship because weaker unions are less able to restrict corporate behavior and the resulting freedom of action for global corporations means unions will be weakened further by companies putting their workers here in competition with low-paid workers abroad.

The restructuring of our political and economic life due to globalization may be as significant a process as the industrial revolution. In early 1996 the mainstream media- incited by the rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan-focused an unusual amount of attention on the plight of U.S. workers in a globalizing economy. As the New York Times editorialized on February 25, 1996: "voters are clearly unnerved by corporate restructurings and the search for cheaper labor overseas." The Times went on to point out that "between 1991 and 1995, nearly 2.5 million Americans had lost their jobs because of corporate restructuring" and these job losses occurred "as the top pay for corporate executives has soared to nearly 200 times that of the average worker."

The February 26, 1996 issue of Newsweek ran a blaring cover story on corporate downsizing entitled "Corporate Killers." The piece was blunt in its criticism of corporate insensitivity: "Something is plain wrong when stock prices keep rising on Wall Street while Main Street is littered with the bodies of workers discarded by big companies like AT&T and Chase Manhattan and Scott Paper. Once upon a time, it was a mark of shame to fire your workers en masse. Today, the more people a company fires, the more Wall Street loves it, and the higher its stock price goes."

Amid the media hype about job losses due to corporate downsizing, a key fact was ignored: a large part of the unemployment afflicting our country is due to a centuries-old drive by companies to replace workers with technology.

Top management sees technology as a way to dump workers-who make demands and question authority-and replace them with machines, which have not been known to form unions.

The trend is evident when you consider that employment in the U.S. manufacturing sector has declined over the past 30 years from 33 percent of the total workforce to less than 17 percent, even though our manufacturing sector has steadily increased output. As this trend continues we will see the elimination of most U.S. manufacturing jobs.

Contrary to what we've been told, the service sector (telecommunications, banking, insurance, real estate, retail and wholesale trade) will not replace the jobs lost in the manufacturing sector. First, the pay tends to be lower in the service sector. And second, technology is also replacing workers in the service sector. Whole layers of white collar office workers are being replaced by small, highly skilled teams using the latest computer technology. Thousands of postal workers have been made redundant by optical scanners and computerization. Between 1983 and 1993 banks in the U.S. replaced 179,000 human tellers with automated teller machines, and even more bank employees will be cut in years to come. It's not that technology is bad, but when technological innovation is used to get rid of workers, with no systematic program to create meaningful replacement jobs, the result is widespread insecurity that saps worker morale. Is it just a coincidence that the U.S. Postal Service has imposed years of high-tech speedup on its workers-thus boosting profits to record levels-yet is also notorious for its workers being among the most severely alienated in the world?

Our government hides unemployment by defining it away. The common sense definition of unemployment-people wanting a job but unable to get one-puts the number of unemployed in 1994 at 15.9 million, or 12.5 percent of the workforce. The official rate (6.1% in 1994) is reached by not counting the 6 million workers who want jobs but are so discouraged they've stopped looking, and counts as fully employed some 30 million who are only working part-time.

Although employers may no longer need us as workers, they do need us as consumers. As a recently laid-off veteran of Bendix Corp. put it: "If they had their way, management would have robots doing everything in the plant, but they forget that robots don't buy anything." If each individual corporation stays focused on climbing the profit ladder in an increasingly global marketplace, it will shed workers for any reason that makes the company more profitable. At the micro-economic level of the company this makes sense. But when all these micro-economic decisions to cut workers are added up, the macro-economic impact is stagnation and all the social ills that go with it.