Now middle-aged and with a family to support, government worker Gerardo Gonzalez has pursued a personal economic strategy familiar to countless Mexicans. Turning to credit cards to compensate for stagnating wages, Gonzalez has juggled multiple accounts, missed a couple payments, and even landed in the Credit Bureau. But the resident of the central Mexican city of Aguascalientes insisted he was not among frivolous people who use credit cards to party the night away or fly off to a beach resort on six-months, interest-free credit. The plastic money goes for expenses like cell phone bills, supplies for his cameras, computers for his children, and medical emergencies. "You never know when you need (credit cards)," Gonzalez observes.
NAFTA's Serfs: From Wage Slavery To Debt Slavery
Posted on Tuesday, June 16 at 10:05 by NAUWATCHContributed By
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The number of collection and foreclosure cases in this one county?174,000?is equal to the total number of people in three entire Chicago wards: every man, woman, and child. I stress - child - in particular, since the banks give out credit cards like candy.
Yes, 174,000 cases - and that was before the economy tanked.
The Economic Policy Institute reports that, since 1972, the median hourly wage for men has remained basically flat, and has actually declined for the bottom fifth of workers. (Women saw more of an improvement, but that’s only because women were grossly underpaid in 1972.) What is more astonishing is that in this very same period, when workers were losing financial ground, their productivity—their output per hour—nearly doubled. They were doing twice as much work for the same wage or less.
...the wage stagnation that resulted from the inability to organize goes a long way toward explaining the current situation. People took their “cut” of productivity by going into debt.
And meanwhile, we lost more and more skill-based jobs. Oh, we had jobs, and even jobs that required college and postgraduate educations. But we stopped being skill-based workers. We became “knowledge workers,” dependent on the financial sector. And knowledge workers, unlike skill-based workers, don’t have the bargaining power to get higher wages out of rising productivity. What can they withhold? They can’t withhold knowledge. And since they have nothing to withhold, it’s much trickier for knowledge-based workers to get a higher wage. And if there are fewer skill-based workers, it becomes harder to raise wages in general. And if it’s harder to raise wages, then more of us go into debt.
I think that NAFTA, asas the precursor to NAFTA has not only made serfs of Mexicans and Canadians. It has eaten the guts out of the American economy as well.