Jon Stewart takes a close look at how globalization is resulting in corporations getting away with lower wages and fewer benefits for their employees by sending jobs overseas – and, as the comedian pointed out – to Texas!
“The globalization of the past few decades allowed corporations to scour the planet for the cheapest labor and loosest regulations, leaving the working class devastated. Capital is mobile and workers are few. So whole industries packed up and left the communities that built them,” he began Friday night’s “The Problem with Jon Stewart.”
“The auto industry left Michigan and Ohio for Mexico and China. Textile companies left from North Carolina to Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Vietnam. And Caterpillar, a heavy machinery manufacturer, sent jobs from Illinois to…wait. What? Texas?!”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott answered Stewart’s question in the simplest form possible: “We have low taxes, fair rules, right to work laws.”
It was a lightbulb moment for Stewart. “I think I understand now,” she said calmly. “Just as China is to America, Texas is to Illinois.”
He’s gone. “Now, if you don’t speak business euphemisms, allow me to translate what the governor said: less tax means less money to spend on infrastructure, fair rules mean ‘you can do that anyway. We’re not using a finger’ and the right to work means weaker unions – which means companies can get away with lower wages and fewer benefits. And they do.”
And Texas wasn’t the only state to play that game. The governors of Florida, Arkansas, Tennessee and South Dakota have gone on record with several incentives to bring big business into their states, all of which hurt workers in the long run while putting more money in businesses’ pockets.
“I don’t want to sound crazy, but wasn’t that what everyone else was complaining about globalization?” Stewart asked.
While many are talking about how jobs are going in Mexico and China, workers in states like Michigan are losing jobs in Tennessee and Texas, where employers are not bound by rules or unions.
“If globalization reduces workers by encouraging companies to move to lower wages, less regulation, less tax markets like China and Mexico, why would you do a smaller version of it in the US?” Stewart pointed. “It is bound to become a race to the bottom between states at the cost of workers everywhere. And, of course, that is what is happening. Take Wages – When GE moved operations from Pennsylvania, a union state, to Rights to Work, Texas, wages rose from an average of $34 per hour to an initial offer of $18 per hour.”
To prove his point, Stewart cited CNBC ranking North Carolina number one for business in 2022. opposite of this, oxfamA global organization whose mission is to “fight inequality to end poverty and injustice”, ranked it 52ndRa in its list.
“In fact, America’s hundred largest cities and counties with the highest average tax exemption policies had the worst inequality,” Stewart said. “We have certainly demonstrated to other countries the same practices that some of these states are doing here.”
Stewart checked in with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper to find out why the state engages in some of these practices to attract businesses, even if it hurts workers.
“As governor, I’m trying to attract better-paying jobs because it’s going to raise the wages of our families. Also I’m fighting the legislature over raising the minimum wage. They won’t. They’re going to do it. And there’s a reason why we’re trying to attract these companies and doing it successfully,” continued Copper, “which raises the boat here in port that everyone’s going to do better.” .
Stewart said in counterpoint, “That trickle-down economics principle, you know, when they say ‘the rising tide lifts all boats,’ I always think ‘Yeah, if you have a boat.’ But if you don’t have a boat, it’s just a rising tide and you sink to the bottom.
