So rather than trying to slow down or stop offshoring or outsourcing directly, workers need to lobby for public policy changes that would help protect their interests?

For example, [say] I work for Selectron. And I am one of many people, even though we may have different employers of record, who do contract manufacturing. I realize that I'm in a very volatile industry. But if I had the ability to come together with my co-workers to negotiate with my employer, we may not be able to negotiate the stemming of the tide of outsourcing. But we certainly can negotiate a trust fund that says that a certain amount of wages and healthcare are covered during periods of dislocation.

And if we had reform in laws, we could have those kinds of agreements across multiple employers ... I think that essentially is the nexus for the next New Deal in America. Which is, yes, we recognize that flexibility is something that employers need to have, but employees need security. And we can have both.

So you can have flexibility for employers, but you can have some kind of continuity for employees?

To achieve that, we'd also need reform of labor law that says that employees and employers are entitled to bargain over this range of issues.

The other problem with the National Labor Relations Act is that it defines a very narrow scope of issues that can actually be brought up for purposes of collective bargaining between employees and employers. The way it works now is that management makes decisions about the firm, and the employees get to sort of bargain over the crumbs that will get left behind.

The new generation of American unions has to be able to play a much bigger role in the strategic direction of the firm and see itself as a partner with the firm.

Current labor law doesn't really address the fact that employers can now easily go to a country where people can't bargain over wages and hours and so on, and have them do the work there for a fraction of the cost.

When it comes to outsourcing, important as it is to have domestic reforms, like labor laws and employment insurance and healthcare reform, we absolutely have to turn our attention to international trade policy as well.

We cannot continue to have trade policy in this country that does not take into account conditions of the workers and the environment. We have all sorts of protections in our trade laws to protect intellectual property. We have all sorts of rules in our trade laws to protect compact discs.

If we had one-quarter of the same rights for a human being as we do for compact discs, we'd see a huge breakthrough in trade policy.

It's complicated, and I'll try to oversimplify it. The debate in this country often has been characterized between people who think that trade is a good thing, and people who think that trade is a bad thing.

The real debate isn't about whether trade is a yes or no, a good prospect or a bad prospect. The real debate in America has to be: Under what conditions do we trade with countries?

[Then] you get into this whole debate where you say: "Well, we should impose an international minimum wage, or we should regulate wages." Many of the Southern developing countries, they don't agree with that. They think that's just America and the First World trying to protect and insulate its workforce. But if you began to have a conversation with the developing world that says, "Let's just simply make as a condition of trade the right for employees to freely associate with one another," it becomes a completely different argument and a completely different discussion.

Because if you say to someone who is slogging away in the developing world for a buck an hour, "What's better? No job or a job for $1 an hour?" the employee is going to tell you that the job for $1 an hour is better. But if you ask that same employee, "What's better? That job for $1 an hour where the employer tells you, 'Here are your hours, and here is the money that you're going to get paid, and here are the conditions under which you work,' or the job that allows you to get together with your co-workers and determine that with your employer?"

What do you think that employee's answer is going to be, no matter what part of the world that they come from?

[This would be] very consistent with the foundation of our country. It's a very Madisonian concept that people should be allowed to freely associate for purposes of advancing their own interests. You couldn't ask for a more Western or American value.

And to be able to extend those values into our trade agreements, I think, is much more respectful of other countries. On the one hand, it protects our interests, but it also protects the interests of workers in those countries.

It's a much more respectful approach to harmonizing trade relations from a workers' rights perspective than creating some kind of international minimum wage, which the developing world sees as a largely American labor strategy to protect and insulate jobs.

So, is there any political movement toward these broader reforms you're describing? The U.S. Senate passed a bill last week that included a provision that would ban giving government contracts to some firms that outsource or offshore. It seems that one limited way that the federal government, and some state governments, are responding to offshoring is by saying, We're not going to give our dollars to companies that do this.

Just by saying, "We're going to create procurement policies that ban doing business with these companies," at the end of the day, it doesn't do anything to help workers, because we're not taking a structural approach to the reform. At the same time, I think those are good moves, because they do begin to thrust the issue into the public debate. It does begin to raise the whole question of values and the economy. What values are important to us as a nation? And I think that's very, very significant, because for many, many years we stopped pursing economic policies as a means toward achieving political values and political goals, and we just sort of said: "Economic policy has value in and of itself."

We have severed the relationship between the economy and values. And I think getting back to these kinds of debates, where local and state governments are willing to assert a certain set of values around conducting its business, is a very significant move.

Do you see anybody working for these larger labor law reforms?

I think that the most exciting thing that's happening in America is that there is a renaissance in the American labor movement. And that for the first time in decades the American labor movement is debating its direction. And it's struggling with lots of different strategies and trying to figure out what is the best way to go to rebuild its presence.

We don't get to rationalize the employment system in America and create any kind of parity of influence for American workers -- I don't care if they're at the high end of the labor market or at the low end of the labor market -- without a resurgent labor movement. There is a very broad economic justice movement growing across America, and the labor movement is at the center of it.

Look around the country and there is all sorts of work going on where people are advancing policies, whether its living-wage policies or community-benefit policies or procurement policies where they are trying to say, "Government -- because we can affect government as an employer -- needs to be able to link its investments to ensuring outcomes for the community."

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