Letters to the Editor
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Protecting the Economy vs. Protecting the Environment
That so many workers have lost their jobs is a legitamate concern, but so is the effect of billions of plastic bags filling landfills and polluting the environment and food chain.
If these workers need something to do, maybe the government can put them to work manufacturing solar panels and low-emission cars, or working on farms to export food to countries that need it. I'm not tyring to be glib, I just don't think that employment and sustainability are mutually exclusive goals.
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Helpful Tip
If you grow up in a town that has a single employer, don't plan on settling down next to the folks. Plan to move. If you must live and work in such a place, rent. It doesn't matter if its Ohio or central China, any given employer can always go bust or pick up and move out.
For China, twenty thousand jobs is like the equivalent of three jobs anyplace else besides India. If those twenty thousand people get really desperate, they can always stage a protest and I'm sure the government will take care of them.
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What the zork kind of plastic bag factory employs 20,000 people?
Didn't they ever hear of industrial machinery?
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Arguably...
Arguably this is also one of the by-products of the constant privatization of former state run and cooperative owned industries in China. Whereas as before, in the arguably problem ridden planned economy, such a juke in legislation would have meant a retooling and reinvestment to manufacture something else, left to its own devices, and unable to get capital to restart, the factory now lays dormant. In fact, ironically enough, the manufacturing base of China has been eroding since the beginning of the great reversal initiated by Deng in his return to power in the late 70's, with service industry jobs taking up most of the slack.
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Welcome to the global economy!
Plastic bags are by and large unneeded. Yes, it's a shame that subsistence farmers lost their subsistence factory jobs. But I believe the greater good is being served.
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I'm with neilpaul
Single-industry towns are almost always a bust.
I grew up in the middle of the dying Oregon timber industry, where propaganda would have you believe that if it weren't for those damn environmentalists, we could have cut down every last old growth tree and everyone would still have timber jobs. Money would grow on trees just like it always did.
Ain't so. What really "killed" the timber industry was and is the same thing that "killed" farming: automation. It just doesn't take as many people to run a sawmill now as it did forty years ago.
Yup, it stinks to lose a job. And it always hurts the little guy worst. But it's the way of the world. Just ask the miners next to played-out mines, the fishermen of overfished oceans, or the UAW workers in Detroit.
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Lets lose the "developing" meme for China
Greetings
I'm sick and tired of China being excused at every turn as a developing nation...
Excuse me
China is a juggernaut rolling over other countries swallowing resourses while more Chinese billionaires and robber barons than any gilded age enjoy their sweet life
The massive inequity is not a function of some developing country mythos, those 'super poor' 20,000 out of work next to the 'super rich' who fill Shanghai is a result of their oligarchy making choices
Nothing more
They can afford to do better, they COULD do better by their citizens, ALL of them.
They don't
Enjoy the journey
WarLord
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Dilemma hard to accept
It's hard to believe, with such a huge demand for labor in Chinese cities, that the factory workers really are up the creek simply by reason of economics.
Yes, if you're in your 50s you probably don't really want to move from provincial Hunan to Shanghai to find work, and no matter where you live it's a blow to learn that the job with the plant you thought you had for life has suddenly been yanked out from under you.
But what we know from our own experience is that mobility is the key to thriving in a free market — and government can be a major guarantor of mobility. (Or it can be an obstacle, as it is in many ways in our country and I'm sure in China as well, though probably for different reasons.)
But how hard would it be to retrain the workers into a new manufacturing industry? Or perhaps even a new regenerative economy? If nothing else, there are billions of plastic bags in China that need to be collected and reprocessed.
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CE- It's happening.
Check out the Solar Companies, LDK, STP, YGE, SOLF, to name a few. China is going to be the Solar Capital of the World, at least as far as manufacturing is concerned. I suspect, though, that they'll also be major users within the next 5 years.
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Fixing Mistakes Are Bad For The Economy?
I'm sure I'm missing something, but from the limited information in the post, it appears that the economy was hurt by razing farmland to build a plastic bag factory, thereby making everyone dependent on that one factory. Probably at the expense of their health and quality of life as well.
I don't want to over-glorify farming. But it sounds like short-sightedness and the neglect of environmental resources hurts the economy more than shutting down a plastic bag factory.
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Actually, ruining the environment is bad for any economy
It always costs more to make a big mess that needs to be cleaned up later, than to avoid making a mess as you go along. And the cost of making a mess that kills you before you can clean it up is effectively infinite.
Almost all "environment versus economy" arguments are false, and seek to confound short term economic interests of particular individuals (certainly not the children of the workers at the bag factory, nor their children...) with the true interests of everyone.
Off topic but related to economics - Salon has permitted an ad which beeps and flashes, and got past my blocker. It is making me go away from Salon. All of your other advertising accounts will now get less clicks. You were fools to allow this. Fire someone and remove this ad or I won't be back.
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Warlord is right, . . .
. . . and what's so frustrating is that China didn't have to choose this path. The leaders in this country wanted to develop, and they also had an iron grip on the levers of the economy. And so they chose what path to being an industrialized country? The same wild-west, no-holds-barred method as the West, wherein some people get ridiculously rich, and the vast majority just get screwed. And, to boot, they have all the pollution and degradation that goes with it.
The lessons of history, coupled with so many recent technological breakthroughs, could have meant a path of more equality and fairness, less rapine, and better lives not only for Chinese workers but possibly for some of the rest of the world as well. Oh well. This is human nature we're dealing with here.