Neoliberalism A New Economic System - 1169 Words

Ruth Xu History 13C 9/12/2014 Neoliberalism In the late twentieth century, the world experiences the emergence of a new economic system. From 1970s to modern day, this dominant economic agenda is coined as â€Å"neoliberalism.† Neoliberalism, a â€Å"new† liberalism, promotes global free market as a more efficient way in producing and supplying. They also advocate for privatization of resources and†¦show more content†¦Labor was affected negatively because NAFTA gave U.S corporations incentives to build factories in developing countries. The idea of NAFTA is to promote inter-continental trade between U.S, Canada, and Mexico. This, however, caused domestic labor and union disputes. A lthough free trade created more job opportunities on the export side, unemployment rate increased as more employers seek to build factories in Mexico to take advantage of its low wage workers and poor health and environmental laws. Likewise, Apple employed 700,000 employees oversea compared to 43,000 people in U.S (Foner 1080). According to U.S. Census Bureau of Labor Statistics, the net job loss in US was around 682,900 as of 2010 (U.S Department of Labor). Due to cheap labor exploited from foreign Mexican workers, the factories that stayed in U.S threatened to move to Mexico in response to union efforts. As a result, unions lost their popularity as more Americans withdrew their support. Similarly, WTO produced a downward pressure on American wages since businesses favors foreign workers over American workers because of their low cost labor. Therefore, as data has shown, neoliberal policy has a negative impact on labor since corporations took advantage of lesser developed countries , causing harms to both U.S and other