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ENDANGERED LABEL: "MADE IN U.S.A.''
PRODUCT AFTER PRODUCT ONCE MADE OR GROWN IN THE UNITED STATES NOW COMES
FROM ABROAD. ONE OF THE BIGGEST LOSERS IN THIS INFLUX: SMALL BUSINESSES.
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
LOOK AT ALMOST ANY household item you buy today and note where it was made. The hammer and screwdriver in the garage were manufactured in China. The notebook on the desk is from Indonesia. The windshield wipers on the car were made in Mexico.
In your closet, the Bugle Boy blue jeans came from Nicaragua. The Speedo running shorts were made in China and Malaysia. The Reeboks in Thailand and Indonesia. The Ralph Lauren Chaps sweatshirt in Pakistan. The Starter official U.S. Olympic baseball cap - inscribed ``Bringing America Together'' - was made in the Dominican Republic.
The great American leisure-time uniform: sweatshirt, blue jeans, baseball cap, sneakers. All made offshore: All American jobs lost.
As a result of the way Washington has handled international trade for the last three decades, industry after industry in America has been hammered. Imports, pouring in since barriers were dropped, have swamped businesses that once provided good, middle-class jobs.
Few pitched battles have marked this war. Rather, it is a series of skirmishes that, except for a celebrated battle or two over autos, rarely attracts much attention.
The list of products invented or developed in the United States but made here no longer, or in trifling numbers, is endless. From telephones to reading glasses, from bicycles to irons, from sewing machines to cameras, from jeans to baseballs.
After the American worker, the biggest loser in this war has been the small businessman. Unlike multinational corporations that have closed factories in the United States and shifted production abroad to take advantage of cheap labor, small companies seldom have that option.
It is these businesses, employing a few to a few dozen workers, that are being squeezed out. Individually, they barely register a blip on the economic indicators. Taken together, they provide a livelihood for millions.
Small businesses have scant access to the people in Congress who write the laws and little influence in the White House. They rarely receive a favorable hearing from regulatory authorities.
With few exceptions, their appeals for help go unheard when imports of competing products from low-wage countries begin flooding in.
Instead, U.S. presidents and trade authorities from both parties conclude - most often incorrectly - that the industries aren't endangered. Afterward, the industries slowly decline, gradually close plants and lay off workers.
That's what happened to the American flatware business.
In the early 1980s, when stainless-steel knives, forks and spoons suddenly surged into the United States from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in response to lowered tariffs and cutthroat foreign pricing, the domestic industry found itself in trouble.
American producers, contending it was unfair competition, appealed to the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) to impose higher tariffs on imported flatware.
The trade commission is an independent government agency whose main job is to monitor the impact of imports on U.S. industries. If the ITC agrees with a complaint, the presidentially appointed commissioners may recommend that duties be imposed.
Even so, there is no assurance the duties will actually be assessed. And in most cases they are not. The final decision rests with the White House, which, historically, has refused to impose additional duties.
After five months of study, the commission ruled on May 1, 1984, that stainless flatware was "not being imported into the United States in such increased quantities as to be a substantial cause of serious injury, or the threat thereof, to the domestic industry."
On the contrary, the ITC held that the "economic data on the performance of this industry fail to demonstrate the required degree of serious injury mandated by the statute. Rather, the industry is doing reasonably well."
According to ITC findings, nine companies produced flatware in the United States in 1982. Today, most of them are either out of business or purchasing flatware from foreign sources.
Except for two plants of Oneida Ltd. in Oneida, N.Y., there is virtually no stainless-steel flatware production in the United States.
WAR OF THE ROSES
To ardent free-traders, the collapse of the domestic flatware industry was inevitable - a case of cheaper foreign products replacing those made in a country where wages, benefits and living standards are higher.
It was inevitable, though, only because the people in Washington have created an unequal playing field.
Contrary to the notion that government is powerless to affect economic forces, government action - or inaction, in this case - can and does change the destiny of American businesses and families.
The federal government stood by and watched the flatware industry sink.
Sometimes, though, Washington does get involved - on behalf of foreign competitors. Just ask the people who grow roses in this country.
Twenty years ago, a bouquet of long-stemmed roses delivered on Valentine's Day more than likely came from a greenhouse in the United States.
Today, most roses sold here are grown on the high plateau outside Bogota, Colombia. And many of those American greenhouses are out of business.
What happened? The most common explanation is that Colombia merely exploited certain natural advantages to corner the market.
As the Wall Street Journal reported Feb. 15, 1996: "The oil crisis of the '70s drove up heating costs at greenhouses, and business shifted south. Colombia and Ecuador, with their cheap labor and ideal climate, took over the market."
Not quite.
Colombia's strongest advantage was not climate, energy costs or even cheap labor. It was the U.S. government.
Colombia began growing flowers for export in the 1960s. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), the arm of the State Department that is assigned to encourage economic growth among poor nations, provided technical assistance to Colombia's growers.
Experts paid by the U.S. government helped Colombian growers cultivate their crops and create a distribution network to get the flowers to market.
In this period - the height of the Cold War - export development by poor countries was a priority of U.S. foreign policy, and an important part of the American gospel of free trade. As early as 1959, according to congressional reports, AID "determined that Colombia must embark on an aggressive export promotion program."
Concluding that the country was much too dependent on coffee, its principal export, AID decided that Colombia should ``diversify and develop other exports,'' so it channeled foreign-aid dollars to encourage the growth of fresh-cut flowers and other industries.
Thus, U.S. taxpayers helped pay the start-up costs for an industry that eventually would undermine one of America's own.
Once Colombia's flower industry was on its feet, producing ever-greater quantities for export, the State Department made certain the roses could be imported free of high tariffs.
At the time, the United States, Western Europe and Japan were the world's largest markets for fresh-cut flowers. Per-capita, the European and Japanese markets were actually larger than the U.S. market. But Europe and Japan, in order to protect their own producers, essentially closed their borders to imported flowers.
So the Colombian growers focused on the United States as the place to send their flowers.
And send them they did.
In 1971, one million rose stems were imported, mostly from Colombia. That represented just two-tenths of 1 percent of sales in the United States.
A decade later, in 1981, imported rose shipments soared to 72 million stems. More important, imported roses now claimed 15 percent of the U.S. market. Again, most came from Colombia.
By 1995, imports had climbed to 752 million stems, giving foreign growers control of the American market - 66 percent of all rose sales.
U.S. rose-growers - whose profits plummeted as they tried to compete with the cheap imports - did not simply sit and watch it happen. Although they might as well have.
The reason: They took their case to a U.S. government that exhibited more concern for the welfare of Colombians than for American growers.
Beginning in the 1970s, the floral industry filed a series of complaints with U.S. trade agencies.
In most of these cases, the U.S. government sided with the Colombian exporters, saying that U.S. growers were not at risk. In the one case in which American growers were judged to have been harmed, federal officials nonetheless declined to levy high duties.
A typical ruling was issued in 1984 by the U.S. International Trade Commission: "Imports of fresh-cut roses from Colombia have had no material impact on the domestic industry. . . . The industry is in a healthy condition; domestic production, shipments, profits and productivity have all increased. . . . Potential imports from Colombia present no threat of material injury to the domestic industry because the industry has exhibited the strength to withstand import competition."
In 1984, when this ruling was made, imports accounted for 22 percent of the roses sold here. Now, it's 66 percent.
As you might expect, U.S. growers have been going out of business or have switched to other flowers.
Among them: White Brothers in Medina, N.Y.; A.N. Pierson in Cromwell, Conn.; Joseph H. Hill Co. in Richmond, Ind.; Desarose in Layton, Utah; Carl Dreisbach Inc. in Louisville, Ky.
The Pittsburgh Cut Flower Co., which will observe its 100th anniversary in 1998, once had 15 acres of greenhouses at Bakerstown and Zelienople, two towns outside Pittsburgh.
Donald E. Hook, the company's president, said the Bakerstown greenhouses once had 250,000 plants, which yielded five million roses, and the Zelienople greenhouses had about 110,000 plants, making Pittsburgh Cut Flower Pennsylvania's largest rose-grower.
But no more.
Throughout the late 1970s and '80s, Hook said, U.S. growers complained to the federal government that foreign growers were dumping flowers in this country - selling them for less than what was charged at home.
"But it's like everything else, whether shoes or steel," Hook said. "In the time it takes to get a decision out of Washington, you are out of business. You can't get an immediate response. Some of these lobbying efforts have gone on for years."
Unable to compete with the cheaper Colombian roses, Pittsburgh Cut Flower closed its greenhouses in 1991 and went from about 140 workers to 35.
Many were longtime employees, Hook said, because "a greenhouse is really a farm with glass over the land, and it requires some farming skills."
That left Dillon Floral Corp. of Bloomsburg, in Pennsylvania's coal region, as the state's largest rose-grower.
Dillon Floral is now in its 121st year. Rob Dillon, the president, represents the fourth generation of the family in the business, which sells about 3 million roses a year. He has set for himself one goal: "To get it to the fifth generation successfully."
It won't be easy.
Dillon said the company's profit per rose has been declining steadily. "It's a free market," he said, "and there's definitely a supply-and-demand effect on that price."
Like most of his colleagues in the industry, Dillon believes that "dumping [by foreign countries] has occurred and that it's been pretty blatant." In fact, he said, "the feeling that many of us have is that the [government] determination that they weren't dumping was somewhat political and not necessarily a truthful, objective decision."
He has good reason to see politics in Washington's handling of the rose import issue. The State Department early on threw its backing to Colombia. And in a $7 trillion U.S. economy, rose-growing is comparatively insignificant.
Officials in Washington, who tend to be solicitous of multinational corporations, treat the rose-growers with indifference - or worse.
In September 1993, David L. Pruitt, chairman of the board of the California Cut Flower Commission, testified before the trade subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee.
After expressing the industry's concern over imports, Pruitt had this exchange with Rep. Sam M. Gibbons, the Florida Democrat who headed the trade subcommittee:
Gibbons: I have some fresh-cut flower growers in my area, too. I know there are some problems. Let me ask you a personal question. Do you all produce this lily which has become so popular in floral arrangements?
Pruitt: Alstroemeria?
Gibbons: I don't know the name of it. It is kind of a yellowish or whitish lily, throws off a very pungent odor.
Pruitt: Stargazer, possibly.
Gibbons: Whatever it is, I got to tell you it so excites my allergies that I have to pull those things out of the arrangements and get them out of the house or out of the office real quick. And my plea to you is, can you all do something about that plant? I don't mean not sell it, but can you do whatever you do to it? . . . If there is some scientist out there that can get that odor out of them, it would sure be appreciated.
As Gibbons fretted about his allergies, thousands of workers in U.S. greenhouses worried about their jobs, and whether Congress would come to their aid.
It didn't.
UNLOADING, NOT GROWING, THEM
While Colombian imports have idled American rose-growers, they also have made Miami International the busiest airport for international cargo in the United States.
Every day, huge 747s loaded with long-stemmed roses touch down around the clock. Thousands of boxes of flowers are unloaded and transferred to more than 50 massive warehouses the size of small hangars on the western fringe of the airport.
There, federal inspectors conduct random tests for pesticides and drugs, usually examining fewer than 2 percent of the imports, and then clear the roses for entry into the United States.
In the warehouse of a large importer, Sunburst Farms, incoming boxes of roses are stacked on tall shelves in refrigerated rooms by one group of workers. Soon another group arrives to transfer the flowers to a waiting truck.
Sunburst and other big importers employ many temporary workers during peak periods to supplement full-time employees.
Most of the jobs involve warehouse work - one of the principal low-tech, low-paid occupations that will characterize the import-based American economy of the 21st century as foreign-made goods continue to supplant domestic-made products.
Nevertheless, when domestic rose-growers have sought tariffs or quotas on Colombian flowers, South Florida politicians invariably claim that thousands of jobs would be jeopardized.
This was spelled out in a Feb. 16, 1996, letter to President Clinton from five Florida members of Congress, who feared that the U.S. government might impose punitive sanctions against Colombia because of that nation's failure to end the illicit drug trade there.
"Such sanctions would cause major harm to Florida," the lawmakers warned, "particularly the economy of South Florida, where more than 7,000 persons are currently employed by the flower importers, who supply over two-thirds of all flowers consumed in the United States."
Without a doubt, the imports have created jobs. But most of them are not in South Florida.
They are in rural Colombia, where an estimated 100,000 people cultivate roses and other flowers.
They work for 65 cents an hour - or less.
HOW THE BARRIERS CAME DOWN
Washington hasn't always made things so easy for its overseas competitors.
For much of its history, the United States had a healthy balance between exports and imports, with exports usually running ahead.
Like other nations, the United States controlled the flow of foreign goods into the country through tariffs. By adjusting import duties, the government shielded some industries and encouraged commerce in others.
Tariffs were viewed as a way to protect the national interest, ensuring the survival of industries, such as steel and autos, necessary for day-to-day living and vital in times of war.
Emerging from World War II as the world's dominant economic power, the United States began promoting lower trade barriers to encourage commerce and help rebuild shattered economies. Foreign-policy concerns also were a major consideration, particularly in the Cold War years.
For these and many other reasons, the United States became the world's free-trade cheerleader. Washington was the prime mover behind the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a pact reached by the world's leading industrialized nations in 1947, that has served as a vehicle to lower trade barriers ever since.
And Washington became the principal force behind regional pacts such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which lowered U.S. tariffs with Mexico and Canada in 1994.
Over the years, to spur other nations, the United States has generally taken the lead in lowering tariffs and reducing nontariff trade barriers.
Other countries - Japan, for one - lowered tariffs, too. But the Japanese have kept the trade barriers in place - government regulations, red tape and collusive business practices that stymie American companies seeking to sell products there.
The result: Japanese companies have essentially unlimited access to American consumers, while U.S. firms have only limited access to the Japanese.
As might be expected, when the United States gradually relaxed its trade barriers, exports and imports fell out of balance as more foreign-made goods surged into the country.
In 1971, the nation recorded its first significant trade deficit, $2.2 billion. Four years of mixed results followed - with deficits in 1972 and 1974 and surpluses in 1973 and 1975.
The 1975 surplus would be the last of this century, as the country ran up a streak of deficits, beginning at $9.5 billion in 1976.
In response, Congress, usually with the cooperation of the White House, enacted one trade bill after another - each aimed at reducing the deficits. Yet they continued to grow.
Along with them went jobs. Since 1979, the number of American manufacturing jobs has skidded from a peak of 21 million to 18.4 million in 1995.
Still, in the face of clear evidence that imports were hurting the American worker, each successive administration has held to the same course, right up to the present day.
For all the tough talk embodied in trade bills through the years, no administration could bring itself to take retaliatory measures against other nations for fear it would set back the cause of free trade. It has been a bipartisan policy that has united politicians who otherwise have little in common.
President Lyndon Johnson in 1968: "Under international rules of trade, a nation restricts imports at the risk of its own exports. Restriction begets restriction."
President Richard Nixon in 1973: "Proposals to close American markets or raise barriers to goods abroad in order to save jobs here, that is terribly shortsighted. . . . If we close our markets in order to save jobs here, we are going to lose jobs for those products that otherwise would be sold abroad."
President Clinton's trade representative in 1994, Mickey Kantor, when asked if Congress should retaliate against Japan: "I am a little worried when we start shutting down our markets, because what we are doing is shooting ourselves somewhere below the knees for doing it."
Oddly, the restrictive practices that these administrations claimed would be detrimental to the United States have proved enormously successful for Japan.
The Japanese haven't just limited imports from the United States. They have chosen certain crucial U.S. products, such as televisions and machine tools, and subsidized their factories to make those products, then inundated the American market with them - while blocking similar products made in the United States from entry into Japan.
As the office of the United States Trade Representative wrote in a 1994 report: "Japan imports relatively fewer manufactured goods than any other [developed] country." Japan's imports have "failed to rise substantially over the past 20 years, despite the lowering of tariffs and other formal trade barriers. . . . Japan's domestic market remains significantly less open to imports and foreign direct investment, despite years of market-opening efforts."
So, contrary to Lyndon Johnson's theory, restrictions do not beget restrictions - at least not when they are imposed on the United States.
Realizing that the United States likely will not retaliate - in large part because powerful special interests profit from maintaining the existing system - countries such as Japan and China ignore threats from Washington and continue business as usual.
WHEN THE RULES DON'T APPLY
Low wages paid to workers abroad are just one reason why small American manufacturers find it impossible to compete in the era of global trade.
But there is more at stake than the standard of living of America's workers. Also at risk is the intricately crafted system of regulations that the United States has fashioned this century to protect its citizens.
A case in point: Tomatoes.
As recently as five years ago, the tomatoes you bought at the local market in the winter probably came from Florida, part of that state's multibillion-dollar winter vegetable industry.
Today, chances are they were grown in the Culiacan Valley in remote west-central Mexico. The gradual lowering of duties on all types of products from Mexico has made this possible.
Unlike a shirt, pair of shoes, child's toy or other manufactured product imported into the United States, which must carry a country-of-origin label, no "Made in Mexico" sign hangs over the produce bin at your supermarket.
Federal law requires such a label, but the government has never enforced it for fresh fruits, vegetables or flowers, maintaining that the rule would be too difficult to administer.
For years, it made little difference. The United States grew virtually all its own winter tomatoes.
No more.
A surge in imported winter tomatoes and other vegetables from Mexico has displaced produce from Florida.
Mexican growers have certain cost advantages. The most obvious is wages. Mexican laborers earn about 25 cents an hour for picking the crop, versus $4.50 or more for pickers in Florida.
But consider, too, the federal and state laws that apply to a Florida grower and not to a Mexican producer: prohibitions against employing child labor, against the use of certain pesticides, and against the overapplication of chemicals.
Chemicals that are banned in the United States can be used freely in Mexico, and there is little regulation of chemical spraying of vegetable crops.
For that reason, you might think that produce from Mexico is carefully inspected at the border before it is sent on to U.S. supermarkets.
You would be wrong.
The tomatoes shipped during the winter months receive only a cursory inspection.
Most Mexican imports come through U.S. Customs at Nogales, Ariz., about 60 miles south of Tucson.
Each day from December through March, more than 300 trucks loaded with tomatoes cross the border at Nogales, where U.S. Customs, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, among other agencies, clear them for entry. Hundreds more trucks arrive each day bearing other types of produce.
The FDA, which checks fruits and vegetables for pesticide residues, has three inspectors at Nogales. They must examine roughly 75 trucks an hour - less than one minute per truck.
This means only a small fraction of the estimated 2.5 billion tomatoes that Mexico ships into the United States during the winter is sampled. Most are waved through after a quick visual inspection. Federal officials, in fact, admit that only about 1 percent of imported produce is inspected.
Not to worry, says the FDA, because Mexican farmers meet high standards in growing and processing their crop.
"You've got state-of-the-art manufacturing down there and in the preparation of the commodities that come up here," said Gil Meza, a spokesman for the FDA in Phoenix.
State of the art?
Listen to this employee of an American food service firm that was forced to discontinue serving certain meals in cafeterias at American-owned plants in Mexico when workers became ill after eating contaminated chicken.
Octavio Galindo, a district manager for Aramark, which provides food for American assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexican border, told an industry magazine: "Probably the worst problem we have had to face is with the raw materials we use for cooking. In Mexico, there is very little, if any, quality control, so for example, in the sacks of beans, we often find dead insects and pebbles."
By contrast, Florida producers who grow winter tomatoes must pay U.S. minimum wage, abide by child labor statutes, and conform to U.S. environmental and pure-food regulations.
Growers in Mexico need not.
How can U.S. growers be competitive, given those regulatory differences?
They can't.
Which is why Florida tomato-growers are fast disappearing, and taking jobs with them. In 1970, the state had an estimated 500 growers in business. Today, there are fewer than 100.
PUTTING THE SQUEEZE ON SHOES
Free trade rewards those producers who incur the lowest costs. It punishes producers who try to ensure a decent wage for their employees.
There's always someone willing to pay laborers less to grow tomatoes or make shoes. And because of that - because an even cheaper competitor is forever just around the next corner - sometimes in the free-trade game, what goes around comes around.
In the late 1960s, U.S. retailers turned to Brazil to supply them with low-cost shoes, mainly women's, for sale in the huge American market. At the time, Brazil had a large domestic industry but little export capacity.
The plan was in line with Washington's theory that encouraging imports would give poorer countries an opportunity to develop, a crucial tenet of American foreign policy.
"Trade, not aid" was a popular slogan then among diplomats and international economists. Rather than simply giving foreign-aid dollars to developing nations, the United States would guarantee a market for a certain percentage of their manufactured goods, spurring job creation and economic growth. To do this required that the United States relax tariffs.
As Rep. Richardson Preyer, a Democrat from North Carolina, told House members on Dec. 20, 1974: "Our fervent hopes for peace and improved living standards in the underdeveloped nations would be doomed if we strangled them with barriers to their exports. It would be particularly foolish to inhibit growth of those whom we have been assisting with our foreign-aid programs over
the past 25 years."
So, to U.S. economists and Latin America experts, Brazil's willingness to gear up its shoe-manufacturing industry and become an exporter was something to celebrate. Here was a developing country progressing to the next stage: shipping out not just raw materials, such as coffee and other commodities - the traditional foreign trade of poor nations - but manufactured goods, which would produce jobs and more export income for Brazilians.
Guaranteed a market in the United States, Brazilian shoemakers built plants, ordered machinery and licensed designs from North America.
By 1971, only Italy, Japan and Spain were sending more shoes than Brazil to the United States.
What Brazil gained, someone else had to lose. That someone was the American shoe manufacturer. Hundreds of American plants closed.
The shoe manufacturers filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission. They charged that their industry was being victimized by shoes priced artificially low by the Brazilians, whose costs were subsidized by the Brazilian government.
After investigating, the commission recommended in 1976 that the U.S. government place a 35 percent tariff on Brazilian shoes.
When the recommendation was sent to President Gerald Ford for action, he declined to impose the duties, saying that such a move "would be contrary to U.S. policy of promoting the development of an open, non-discriminatory and fair world economic system."
What's more, Ford, in what turned out to be a classic misreading of the health of the shoe industry, said it had seen its darkest days and was well on the road to recovery. In his order refusing to act, Ford said:
"The U.S. footwear industry is benefiting from a substantial increase in production, shipments, and employment as a result of the economic recovery. Additionally, a number of plants have reopened, order backlogs of domestic manufacturers have increased, and profitability has improved.
U.S. employment in the industry, which has been steadily declining over recent years, also shows signs of picking up. . . . Meanwhile, imports of the nonrubber footwear covered by the [trade commission] recommendation . . . have been leveling off."
Leveling off? In 1960, shoe imports averaged 2.2 million pairs a month. In 1976, when Ford issued his ruling, shoe imports totaled 29.2 million pairs in one month. And by 1980, they rose to a monthly average of 30.5 million pairs. That number shot up to 74.8 million in 1990 and to 90 million in 1995.
More significant, in 1960 foreign shoe manufacturers held just 4 percent of the U.S. market. By 1995, they controlled 89 percent.
The number of jobs fell from 172,000 in 1976 to 146,000 in 1981 and then to 57,900 in 1994.
After Ford refused to act on Brazilian imports, American shoe companies continued to go back to trade authorities, seeking relief. But a new president from a different political party, Jimmy Carter, also declined to help.
Thus unimpeded, the Brazilian shoe industry boomed, becoming, year-in and year-out, one of the three largest exporters of shoes to the United States. Brazil soon had more than 3,000 plants, employing upward of 300,000 people.
And then, just as fast as they had grown, Brazil's shoe exports began to decline.
There was a new kid on the export block: mainland China. Exploiting the same low-tariff policies that had fostered the Brazilian industry, the Chinese replicated the Brazilian model - only more cheaply.
By 1993, the Brazilians were quite alarmed at this new upstart. An industry trade journal, Footwear News, reported on Dec. 6, 1993: "Despite gains in export dollars, Brazilian footwear exporters expressed growing concern about China's capturing a greater slice of the leather-footwear market, especially in the United States."
In its peak years, Brazil shipped $1.8 billion worth of shoes annually to the American market. Today, according to Heitor Klein, executive director of the Brazilian shoe industry association, shipments are $1.2 billion.
The decline in exports has devastated the shoe industry in southern Brazil. Klein says about 200 plants have closed and 55,000 shoe workers have lost their jobs in the last two years.
The speed with which China surpassed Brazil and went on to become the chief shoe exporter to the United States was "very dramatic," he said.
Brazil is fast losing a market it only recently captured. And it's not likely to win that market back.
Why?
What goes around comes around: Brazilian shoe workers earn too much money to compete with Chinese.
The pay of the average Brazilian shoe worker is less than a dollar an hour, about $150 a month.
That's big bucks compared to the average pay of Chinese shoe workers.
Their earnings: 25 cents an hour, or $50 a month.
Research help was provided by Bill Allison. Also contributing to the research were John Brumfield, Harold Brubaker and Tirdad Derakhshani, as well as Inquirer library staffers Denise Boal, Frank Donahue, Joe Daley, Alletta Bowers, Sandra Simmons and Ed Voves.
Copyright 1996 PHILADELPHIA NEWSPAPERS INC.
May not be reprinted without permission.
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