new book<\/a> puts it, in glorious understatement, is \u201ca president like no other.”<\/p>\nBut what seems more likely than a new resolution to play by the WTO rules is some sort of ad hoc deal in which the two leaders work out a more or less formal job exchange: so many thousand for you in restored ZTE jobs versus so many thousand for me in steel and aluminum, plus guarantees from you to limit exports to the U.S. from your burgeoning auto industry and so on and so on. <\/p>\n
Judging by reports about the NAFTA negotiations, which are winding down to a Thursday deadline for congressional action this year, this kind of jobs-toting mercantilism drives the U.S. negotiators, who seem mainly interested in keeping X-number of auto sector jobs in the northeastern states that were key to Trump\u2019s electoral college victory.<\/p>\n
Various superficially non-discriminatory formulas have been devised to get this done, the latest of which focuses directly on wages, with the stipulation that a certain percentage of the work on a car must be done by people making more than US$15 per hour if it\u2019s to qualify as North American content.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s neutral on its face but because assembly wages are lower in Mexico than in Canada or the U.S., it binds Mexico more. No one argues that Mexican wages below US$15 aren\u2019t competitively determined \u2014 Mexico has a bigger supply of lower-skilled labour than either Canada or the U.S. \u2014 or that auto companies haven\u2019t raised wages in Mexico by making investments there. It\u2019s just that lower-paid Mexicans now do work higher-paid Americans and Canadians used to do. But lower-wage labour is Mexico\u2019s only advantage. It\u2019s not going to out-compete the U.S. or Canada in terms of investment or R&D or infrastructure. What else would we expect? <\/p>\n
Co-operation among leaders is nice. Many times it\u2019s better than the alternative. But we don\u2019t want trade patterns determined by President Trump and President Xi. We want trade patterns determined by which country\u2019s workers and investors can do which jobs and projects better than other countries\u2019 can. What we really want is to get politicians out of these decisions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We don’t want trade patterns determined by President Trump ‘working together’ with President Xi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9544"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9544"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9545,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9544\/revisions\/9545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifeinsurance-orleans.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}