A Time of Flux for Electrolux

Richard Longworth

An interesting news story on local Grand Rapids television last night concerning the long awaited closing of an Electrolux plant. While the story was fair and optimistic, I got a bit of a kick out of soundbite from Chicago writer Richard Longworth who said: “A wonderfully decent way of life is now just being undermined by productivity, by the global economy.” Now, losing a job can be a terrible thing (its worth noting, though, that one of the workers in the story seemed glad to have the chance to “do something new” with his life--so sometimes change can be good as well). But regarding the idea of lives being undermined by globalization, I couldn’t help but thinking of the insight of former President of El Salvador Francisco Flores, who will be featured in our next issue of Religion & Liberty:

Francisco Flores

[S]ome people say that they’re against trade because they will be losing jobs. What these critics don’t realize is that the choice is not between giving a job to a Salvadorian or giving it to an American citizen. That’s not the choice. The choice is whether you will allow your enterprises to survive or not. If you allow your enterprises to create a more efficient division of labor and become more competitive by creating alliances throughout the world, then your corporations will survive. If you keep them closed in, then what will happen is that other corporations throughout the world will construct these alliances, you will lose the competitive edge you have, and you will not only lose jobs, you will lose the companies.

Stay tuned for more from Flores and others in this quarter’s R&L.

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