Defining and Measuring a Global Living Wage: Theoretical and Conceptual Issues Mark Brenner Assistant Research Professor Political Economy Research Institute 10th floor Thompson Hall University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003-7510 413-545-6355 phone 413-545-2921 fax
[email protected] http://www.umass.edu/peri April, 2002 Prepared for the conference Global Labor Standards and Living Wages at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, April 19-20, 2002. The author would like to thank Jim Boyce, Elissa Braunstein, Justine Burns, Nancy Folbre, James Heintz, Pavel Isa, Scott Littlehale, Stephanie Luce, Robert Pollin, and Mohan Rao for their thoughtful input into this project at various stages. I. Introduction While there are many questions still to be answered about the degree to which global integration has fundamentally changed the U.S. economy, one area where the answer is unambiguous is in the manufacturing sector. This is particularly true of labor intensive manufacturing operations such as textile and apparel production, which have seen dramatic declines in absolute employment levels, as well as dramatic increases in the proportion of domestic consumption produced outside the U.S. To get a sense of the magnitude of these shifts, in 1940 there were more than 2 million people employed in textile and apparel production in the U.S., accounting for 6.5 percent of non- farm employment. By 2001 there were slightly more than a million individuals involved in textile and apparel production, accounting for less than 1 percent of non-farm employment. Over the same period import penetration increased dramatically, as the value of clothing and footwear imports rose from a mere five percent of the value domestic production in 1958 to nearly 300 percent of the value of domestic production by 1999.1 As has been well documented, much of the international textile and apparel production originates in the developing world, particularly East Asia and Latin America (e.g.