Trendevents: American Workers Better off Working for European Affiliates

Clyde Wilson

1994

Published in:

Northwest Technocrat Newsletter, April 1995, No. 123

According to a report of 90 multinational corporations, European companies provide more jobs for American workers than all other countries. The report by the European-American Chamber of Commerce points out that about 2.9 million Americans were employed by European affiliates or firms in the United States in 1990. American corporations with overseas affiliates employed about 2.8 million European workers, or about as many workers as European companies do in the U.S.

In all, 4,615 companies owned or partly owned by European multinationals employed 2,880,600 American workers in the United States in 1990, or about 3 percent of the U.S. work force, with heavy concentration in food, chemical and machinery industries.

Among the findings in the report:

...European affiliates operating in the U.S. tend to hire skilled labor and pay 19 percent higher wages than American firms.
...European manufacturing affiliates employ 1.3 million workers and provide more than 7 percent of all U.S. manufacturing jobs.

It is ironic that European multinational corporations with their affiliates in the United States can afford to pay American workers in wages one-fifth more money than those American companies that are operating in the U.S. It doesn't say much for those American corporations whose management and CEO's are paid many times more than the average and most skilled American worker. (The Crystal Report reveals that CEO Sanford I. Weill was paid $50.7 million last year.) While American workers have been making and continue to make all kinds of concessions to American industries, the management and CEO's of the largest corporations in the United States continue to receive all kinds of perks, stock options and pensions upon retirement amounting to millions of dollars. In an economic system where growth and expansion, and investments and maximizing profits are foremost, American corporations and management have no qualms when it comes to laying off thousands of workers, closing plants, moving or building new plants in a foreign country where the labor is cheap, taxes are minimal or don't exist, and there are few or no environmental or other restrictions.

If the largest of U.S. corporations and industries cannot hold their own or compete, wagewise or otherwise, in their own country, the idea of global competitiveness has a hollow ring. For most Americans, economic equality has been and will continue to be an illusion. But there is an alternative. Besides implementing a balanced production-distribution mechanism, all the United States needs to do is mobilize all of its resources and use its scientific-engineering expertise to update and build its social and industrial complex into a viable and harmonious operation (second to none in the world today.)