This is an interesting older article about outsourcing

[Juche]

It is about outsourcing of Mexican factory work to China. It was written in 2002 but I think it is good.

Sometimes people get angry at the nation and inhabitants of Mexico for NAFTA and the loss of jobs. But the same thing happens there that happens here (companies pull up stakes and take off if they can find a nation with lower wages and fewer environmental protections). The companies shut down the Mexican factories and move them to China.

And the second those Chinese goods can be produced more cheaply in Vietnam, the factories are shut down in China and moved to Vietnam.

The part about all the factory workers having a party and saying goodbye happens all over the world. People in the US see their job security and friends disappear while the factory moves to Mexico. Then the same thing happens in Mexico when the factory moves to China. Then the Chinese have the same thing happen when the factory moves to Vietnam. The Vietnamese will see the same thing happen when those factories move to Africa.

Point is, rather than getting mad at other nations and other people, we need to keep in mind it is the plutocratic class who is our enemy, not Mexicans or Chinese people.

http://www.grossmont.edu/carlos.contreras/History126/Mexico_articles/Mexican%20Workers%20Pay%20for%20Success-%20maquiladoras.htm

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Cesiah Ruiz Brena came to Tijuana in 1989, deliriously happy to get a job at a new Japanese factory. Her work space was grand, the lights were bright and the pay was unimaginably good: $100 a week to start.

But after 13 years during which her wages rose to $200 a week, Ruiz Brena lost her job on June 1. Her Canon inkjet printer factory shut down. She and her co-workers shared a cake, snapped photos of one another and said goodbye. The factory, they were told, was moving to Thailand and Vietnam, where wages are as low as $15 a week -- less than what she earns in a day.

All along the Mexican border with the United States, once-busy factories are closing. Since the end of 2000, tearful farewell parties have been held for 250,000 factory workers in Mexico. Some of the same jobs that left North Carolina textile plants and Ohio auto-parts assembly lines for Mexico in the 1980s are now moving to Asia. The reason is the same: cheaper labor.

The loss of jobs here in part reflects the slowdown in the U.S. economy. But many of the plant closings are just the globalized economy at work. Factories came to take advantage of low wages; now that success has driven wages up, they are moving on. Mexico is left with a bittersweet legacy: higher wages, but fewer jobs.

More than 500 foreign-owned assembly-line factories in Mexico, called maquiladoras, have closed in the past two years, in part because wages have doubled in the past 10 years and are no longer considered low in the world economy. An entry-level factory worker in Tijuana earns $1.50 to $2 an hour, compared with 25 cents an hour in parts of China.