The New York Times reports on yet another malign effect of "free" trade -- the structural steel for the $7.2 billion San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is being made by a Chinese firm that pays its workers $12 for a 16-hour workday.
Of course, that is a lot less than any skilled American steel worker would get, since it's less by a factor of 10 or so than the minimum wage for legal workers in the U.S.
The California DOT claims that it will save at least $400 million (about 18 percent) by having Chinese industrial coolies do the steel fabricating work.
More, below.
First of all, h/t to mistermix at Balloon Juice, whose take on this industrial/"free trade" disgrace includes:
As long as government — which, after all, builds all the bridges — can outsource major projects like this to the lowest-bidding, most exploitative employer in the entire world, we’re not going to have an local industry able to build new bridges. Such is the monumental, self-serving stupidity of our Galtian/governmental confluence.
While almost every bridge/highway improvement project in the U.S. depends substantially (usually 85 percent) on support from the federal government:
California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the “Buy America” provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers.
And employing American workers. Can't do that if they cost more than desperate, semi-skilled Asians.
Presumably CDOT figured that into the $400M savings estimate, along with having to spend millions on this, buried at the bottom of the article:
To ensure the bridge meets safety standards, 250 employees and consultants working for the state of California and American Bridge/Fluor (the money-sucking general contractor) also took up residence in Shanghai.
I'm no expert on steel fabricating for bridges, but I seriously doubt that an American company that does steel fabricating would necessitate 250 quality control types on site for years.
CDOT and the general contractor know that semi-slave labor cannot produce the same steel product that American union workers do.
They'll pretend that does not matter, and we won't know whether they're right for decades.
Or until the next tremblor in the Bay area.
The United States is in the midst of an unprecedented (since the 1930s) unemployment crisis, and California spending billions of public monies employing foreign steel workers for a major domestic bridge project does not help at all.