Working Life

The world currency markets were abuzz on Friday when China’s currency, the renminbi (“the peoples’ money,” also known as the yuan), traded for 20 minutes above the mark it has held for almost a decade. Was it a mistake, quickly corrected, or a little test by the the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, […]

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Today’s Wall Street Journal has the not-surprising piece “WTO Urges CautionOn Textile Restraints.” (requires subscription). The head of the WTO, says the article, “says it would be a mistake for countries struggling with a surge in Chinese textile exports to throw up protectionist walls right away, just as Europe and the U.S. take steps in […]

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Ketih Bradesher writes in The New York Times today that deals being made by China foreshadow “what now seems to be shaping up as a broad assault on global automotive markets by Chinese companies and the Chinese divisions of multinational companies.” Obviously, this has grave implications for the already weak auto industry in the U.S.—and […]

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It isn’t surprising. Indeed, as predicted with the end of world wide quotas on textiles, China is now annihilating any other country even remotely involved in textiles. The Commerce Department reported on Friday (as reported in today’s New York Times) that imports on textiles and apparel products from China rose more than 63 precent in […]

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I was just rereading the AFL-CIO’s petition, filed almost a year ago, with the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office that sought to force the U.S. to hold China accountable for its repressive labor practices. It’s a startling story of the challenge Chinese workers face—and, by extension, what labor faces in the U.S. in trying to grapple […]

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Pension power and China on my mind this morning. On pension, kudos to Bill Patterson and his band of pension-fund activists at the AFL-CIO. They forced Waddell & Reed, a Kansas-based financial services firm, to pull out of the business-funded (ready for an Orwellian-sounding title) Alliance for Worker Retirement Security (AWRS), the coalition pouring millions […]

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Reading a fascinating book called “The Chinese Century” by Oded Shenkar (see recommended books). China is already the main global player in toys (70 percent of the world’s output), bicycles (60 percent), half its shoes and one-third of its luggage. But, Shenkar’s main point is that it is wrong to assume that China is simply […]

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If you wanted any more information about the rise of China as the world’s global economic power of the next century, today’s Wall Street Journal reports: “China’s trade volume was $1.1 trillion in 2004, state media reported, up from $850 billion the previous year. The record annual trading volume, the sum of China’s exports and […]

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