For America's Lil' Three (now down to 3.1%of total U.S. GDP (personal consumption spending now accounts for 70%)), the answer is likely to be Mexico. The reason? Automotive unions in Mexico have agreed to cut wages to 'near China levels':
http://biz.yahoo.com/...
Unfair trade policies and free market indoctrination are main players in creating downward pressure on wages worldwide. Yet the leadership of the United Autoworkers union (UAW) deserve special recognition for their complicit role in the devaluing of work around the globe. The UAW's inability to even attempt to organize globally, fight unfair trade, demand national health care, deny concessions to profitable companies, and represent workers' basic interestsis not without real-world impact. Staging bogus strikes in order to convince members 'we tried and failed, sovote against your economic interest, again,' is the UAW's only bargaining strategy. Judged by their actions, the UAW is the Lil' Three's HR Department – not the members' mechanism to fight exploitation and lying cries of poverty and pending bankruptcy. It's called cooperation –or jointness - whereby, the personal interests of union leaders are (manipulated to be) more inline with management than the rank-and-file, dues-paying members they are elected (or appointed) to represent.
After 20+ years of jointness-poisoned union leadership and epically disastrous planning, executing and management decisions by the Lil' Three (too distracted with systemic union-busting to design vehicles people want and need), the 2007 UAW Contract was the big payoff: the giving back of 70 years of the wage and benefit gains that built the Middle Class and set workers' rights benchmarks that all American Industries were obliged to follow. Unfortunately, all American Industries are now obliged to follow the UAW in the opposite direction.
The 2007 concessions contract, handed to the Lil' Three by the UAW, amounted to 50% wage cuts, elimination of all health care and pensions for new hires, and the negation of unionism's most basic tenet ('an injury to one is an injury to all') with the creation of a second, lower classification of workers: the new hires who will replace those the companybuys off. Now, non-union Toyota plants in The South are following suit, cutting their wages further. And why wouldn't they? If a union voluntarily lowers the bar below non-union shop levels, the non-union shop has a 'fiduciary responsibility' to likewise screw workersin the spirit of competitiveness.
Yet the real battle over labor competitiveness does not involve North or South, Union or Non-Union, Mexico or China, Productivity, Experience or even Social Responsibility. In global capitalism, the race to the bottom is run by all workers in all industries in all countrieswhether they know it or not. And the only aspect of competitiveness that matters is the price you put on your labor. HINT: Cheapest Wins.
This gutting and cheapening of workers' roles in the production of essential goods and services is alarming enough. However, given the clear need for, and big auto's stated change in direction towards, more fuel-efficient vehicles, a shift that should be a significant part of any life-saving "Green Economy," the automotive laborers required to so radically transform transportation are contractually assured to be excluded from their rightful share of the promised environmental boom.