Where Are the Millions of Old Summer Youth Jobs?

According to Laura D’Andrea Tyson’s, dean of London Business School, May 2, 2005 BusinessWeek, article, Stop Scapegoating China—Before It’s Too Late—“The US and China have benefited enormously from their economic ties”. It’s clear by this statement, Ms. D’Andrea does not get out much and thinks the Eastern ghetto of London and the 600,000 abandoned industrial ghettos (brownfields) in the US, are a necessary evil of the new multinationals industrial slave labor plantations in China.

As Trenton and other urban American industrial cities get ready for a long hot summer of youth violence, murders, rapes and gang warfare we, as a community have to answer the fundamental question of where are the millions of summer youth jobs for our children in America. In the metropolitan area of greater Trenton, i.e. Lower Bucks County, Trenton, Ewing, Lawrence and Hamilton there is a need for 10,000 summer youth jobs. Trenton alone has a need for 5,000 jobs. Less than 3,000 local youth will find summer employment. That leaves more than two Trenton Central High Schools of children doing nothing. This is multinationals economic violence against our own children for being nothing more than children. The city of Trenton nor its churches has the financial resources to fund a massive 10 million-dollar summer youth educational and employment program.

With only 1 in 5 urban youth between the age of 16 and 19 working, 4 out of 5 youth are not working. Where are the young adult YMCA day care programs to keep kids out of the streets? Its time for the Black community to look its youth in the face and tell them it has failed to provide more effective politicians, business leadership or economic choices to protect their summer jobs. Taking responsibility must start in the home.

The answer to solving the crisis of summer jobs requires connecting some difficult economic 101 and political 102 colored dots missing in the local newspapers. First, the federal government is running $600 billion in the red, $200 billion of which is the war in Iraq. Public Schools are out for the summer so childcare expenses increases. New Jersey state government and other states are downsizing which means summer youth programs are downsizing. The manufacturing plants that closed before Xmas are still closed. Finally a lot of youth jobs are going to Asia, Canada and Mexico. The Chinese trade deficit was almost $200 billion last year and cost millions of American jobs, many of which were youth jobs.

Multinationals like Wal-Mart see no point in paying American urban youth 6 or 7 dollars an hour for work experience, when they have adults in Asian willing to work for less than a dollar aa hour to do the same thing.

The direct consequence of the overseas cheap labor is that only 1 in 5 Black children are working. Bay Bay kids are nothing more than a growing underclass of post-industrial dehumanized and marginalized American children victimized by U.S. multinational foreign trade. Most urban youth would jump at a real summer job. The U.S. media hype is to obfuscate the deadly effects that Asian slave labor is having on American youth and employment. The inner city has major problems that would be manageable with full employment. The new waves of Chinese slave labor cuts off the transitional employment opportunities young Black workers need to develop their value added skills and human potential.

There are more African American youth in jail than in senior colleges. The youth are being retarded by the dysfunctional educational culture of the so-called Bay Bay kid’s subculture and the collapse of public school funding. The collapse is happening at the same time that foreign value added imports are driving up the educational bar for most employment. This is evidenced by the fact that less than 20 % of Black youth, 16-19 years of age are in the workforce. Very few Black children are working in digital manufacturing or support jobs.

Beyond the well documented and deepening challenges faced by African Americans in basic computer literacy, the lack of developed critical thinking skills and expression in a paperless, virtual industrial culture is alarming. In a blistering critique of American schools before the Governors Association, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft said “American high schools are obsolete and are ruining the lives of millions of Americans ever year.” Mr. Gates said, “In district after district, wealthy white kids are taught Algebra II while low-income minority kids are taught to balance checkbooks.”

Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia chairman of the association, said, “The economic ramifications of that (poor schooling) could be devastating to our country.”

The most immediate economic ramification is the fact that America lacks the high school students educated in digital manufacturing and service support jobs to form the basis for the massive transition to virtual manufacturing in the U.S. While Mr. Gates is building a model paperless high school in Philadelphia, the cause Mr. Gates speaks to, would be better served if Microsoft built a dual use XBox/laptop for 160 dollars, and offered online high school training classes for digital manufacturing and support services. Also, the Xbox could turn itself off during school hours.

Virtual reality digitalized manufacturing would necessitate workers able to function in a totally Internet-based computer integrated design and manufacturing environment. Informational-based educational models emphasizing mathematics, science and critical thinking, would have to replace the assembly line orientation of today’s public school education.

The real truth is that there is a deadly slave triangular backdoor sub-assembly trade growing between China, Canada and Mexico in components and sub-assemble and final assemble that ends up in America as cheap imports. Millions of the summer youth jobs are lost to this backdoor trade.

Re-exports by multinationals return home as Chinese exports. It is common knowledge in the international business and banking communities, that 70 to 80 per cent of value-added goods exported by China are actually manufactured as re-exports by multinationals in China mainly to take advantage of the slave labor and modern final assembly infrastructure. Billions of dollars of U.S. exports to China are in reality, just value added components and sub-assemblies that make the round trip return to America as China re-exports. For example the every popular iPode radio by Apple was designed in America; most mission critical parts were manufactured in Japan. The final assembly of the iPod takes place in China. Most of the 198 billion dollars of Chinese exports to the U.S. is not Chinese exports, but in fact multinational reexports. The U.S. final assembly jobs exported to China, 250,000 in 2004 are the same jobs Black Americans and young white workers historically use as stepping-stones into manufacturing and are most impacted by Chinese imports.

In August of 2004, ten Nobel laureates in economics crossed over the multinational line and wrote a public letter that ruthlessly attacked the Bush Administration for embarking on a reckless and extreme course that endangers the long-term economic health of the nation. Wal-Mart’s relationship to China and slave wages was singled out as a key subject of the letter.

The Nobel laureates’ attacks focused on the mega middlemen distribution network within the U.S. that sells and profits from Chinese slave labor. The other secret is that over two trillion dollars are made in final sales in the United States and Europe, by non-Chinese middlemen on the $420 billion of multinational exports from China. The markup on Chinese imports is the greatest profit margin in American business history since the early Rockefeller oil era and the good old days of white gold, i.e. North American Black slavery.
The ghetto dark side of famous stories are about the two-dollar Nikes marked up to $125 in the mall. The fact that many of the stores that used to employ urban youth, no longer offer any jobs, because increasing numbers of consumers are either shopping at mega stores like Wal-Mart or at Internet online wholesale stores.

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