Under existing WTO rules, though, Washington has indicated it intends to continue restricting garment and textile imports from many of these countries—especially China.

The 1974 arrangement protected the profits of U.S.-based companies and businesses in other imperialist countries against competitors in the semicolonial world. According to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, these quotas cost semicolonial nations $40 billion annually in lost exports.

Leading up to the January deadline, trade conflicts mounted over the $400 billion world trade in garment and textiles. The loudest voice demanding new protectionist measures was the most powerful imperialist power in the world—Washington.

In addition to any new quotas, the U.S. rulers already wield the club of duties to protect the profits of U.S. manufacturers from competition from imports. Bangladesh, for example, which exports $1.7 billion in apparel to the United States, faces an average of 16 percent, or $300 million a year, in duties. U.S. duties for garments and textiles range from 16 percent to 33 percent.

Charging that they will be devastated by competition from Chinese manufacturers, a coalition of U.S. textile trade associations and the UNITE trade union appealed to U.S. president George Bush to cap several categories of garment imports from China at 7.5 percent above the value of shipments over the last year. As a condition of China’s admission into the WTO in 2001, Washington won “threat-based safeguard provisions,” allowing the U.S. government to limit the growth of Chinese clothing and textile imports from 2005 through 2008. “The Bush administration has already ordered new limits on Chinese shipments of four categories of clothing, and has threatened new limits on a wide range of additional categories,” reported the December 13 New York Times.

According to the National Coalition of Textile Organizations (NCTO), a business group, the crisis in the U.S. textile industry has been precipitated by China. The NCTO asserts that in clothing categories where quotas were removed in 2002, China’s market share went from 9 percent to 72 percent as of last June. “Because of these trade practices, the U.S. textile industry has been forced to close 300 textile plants, including more than 50 textile plants during the last year and a half,” the NCTO states. It demagogically argues that 650,000 more U.S. jobs are at stake—a figure roughly equal to the total number of U.S. textile jobs.

“Where will our Armed Forces go?” the NCTO asks. “Will our soldiers have to wait for Chinese textile producers to agree to meet our military’s specifications not just for quantity but for quality?”

Textile bosses in the United States are using some of the same patriotic, prowar arguments—aimed at convincing workers that bosses and their employees have common interests to defend “our company” or “our country”—to get workers to go along with ramped up production, lower wages, and deteriorating working conditions. The bosses try to convince us that we compete with workers in underdeveloped countries in order to deflect any resistance to the employers’ antilabor offensive at home.

Crying crocodile tears, the textile industry owners sometimes also pose as the benefactor of the semicolonial world. “If they won’t necessarily listen to the concerns of the domestic producers, maybe they’ll listen to the concerns of the Third World,” said Augustine Tantillo, executive director of the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition.

U.S. textile and apparel bosses, joined by their Turkish counterparts, led an effort to appeal to the WTO to postpone the lifting of the MFA and to take action against their rivals in China. Ninety-six trade groups from 54 countries signed on to this call, known as the Istanbul Declaration. “The developing world sees China as a predator stalking them like prey,” stated Ziya Sukun, executive director of the ITKIB Association USA, a Turkish textile and apparel business group.

Reflecting the contending capitalist interests, the U.S. Association of Importers of Textiles and Apparel—representing retailers such as J.C. Penney—immediately filed suit seeking an injunction blocking the Commerce Department from considering the U.S. textile bosses’ petition. “If U.S. retailers can’t get sufficient supplies of merchandise from China, they’ll simply turn to other foreign manufacturers, not U.S. manufacturers,” said Erik Autor, of the National Retail Federation. An editorial in the December 12 New York Times commended the retailers’ association for “fighting back” against “the whiny [textile] manufacturers’ requests to impose new limits on China.”

In the face of new and threatened quotas and demands by the Bush administration that Beijing take steps to limit its exports, the Commerce Ministry of China announced in December that it would voluntarily impose some tariffs on its $100 billion garment and textile exports this year. At the same time, Chinese officials protested efforts by U.S. manufacturers to limit free trade. China has a relatively modern and massive textile and apparel industry—with 30,000 factories exporting goods and 35,000 to 40,000 geared to the domestic market. Production is also integrated—from raw materials like cotton, to spinning and weaving of fabric, down to the last button on an article of clothing. Its main advantage, though, is its massive, cheap labor supply.

Recognizing opportunities to make a profit in China, some U.S. manufacturers have announced plans for joint ventures in that country. One example is the International Textile Group-China Ting venture. U.S. capitalist Wilbur Ross formed ITG by merging Burlington Industries—at one time the world’s largest textile company with 80,000 employees and 149 plants—and Cone Mills, a denim maker. Ross bought both of these companies after they declared bankruptcy.

Many in the big-business media have hailed the fact that employers worldwide will use the dropping of MFA quotas to push for further cuts in wages and working conditions. “It’s a new world order now, where Thailand and Turkey will compete furiously to reduce costs and eliminate unnecessary red tape, all so they can be the ones awarded the contract to run up your next pair of jeans,” said an editorial in the New York Times. “Let’s pull up the anchor; it’s time for those ships to sail.”

Others in big business, like those represented by the NCTO, continue to complain about “unfair competition” from textile and apparel production in semicolonial countries.

This demagogy notwithstanding, finance capital from the United States and the rest of the imperialist world robs enormous amounts of wealth from these countries for the coffers of imperialist banks and other financial institutions. This extortion is guaranteed not primarily by “unfair” terms of trade imposed from the outside onto the world market. It is guaranteed primarily by the differential value of labor power and the gap in the productivity of labor between the imperialist countries, on the one hand, and those exploited by imperialism, on the other.

Wages and other labor costs for textile and clothing bosses, for example, average $.70 an hour in India, $.92 in China, $1.20 in Thailand, and $1.70 in Mexico, according to business studies. These countries face the problems of underdevelopment—including lack of electricity, roads, ports, and communications systems—which make it impossible for them to compete on an equal footing.

Imperialism warps the economic structures of the semicolonial world. The “comparative advantage” of oppressed nations in the world capitalist market is largely restricted to producing and exporting agricultural goods and raw materials, as well as in recent decades serving as an “export platform” for light manufactures or other industrial goods—like garment and textiles—often made in imperialist-owned factories. Even with regard to these goods, countries in the semicolonial world get slapped down every time they try to horn in on markets sought by the titans of agriculture and industry in North America, Europe, and Japan.

Countries where apparel and textile predominate have been and will continue to be vulnerable to protectionist measures. These include Bangladesh, where garments account for 77 percent of total exports—of which 94 percent goes to markets until now governed by MFA quotas; Sri Lanka, where 71 percent of export revenues are from textile; and Pakistan, where 45 percent of manufacturing jobs are in textiles.

Worldwide employment in the textile and garment industries is estimated at tens of millions of workers. As the world capitalist economic crisis deepens, textile and garment bosses are competing ferociously to increase their cut of the surplus value produced by these workers. Textile and garment workers all over the world face the common problems of lay-offs, speedup, longer working hours, stepped-up attacks on our working conditions, and lack of medical care and pensions. Workers face a common enemy, too: the textile and clothing bosses and the capitalist governments that represent their interests in every country where we live.

Anne Parker is a textile worker in Atlanta.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home