I’ll never forget an interview I did years ago with the late Richard Trumka, the then-president of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest labour union. Trumka, a tough-talking former Pennsylvania coal miner turned lawyer, told me about a conversation he had had in the 1990s with a Clinton administration official about the fallout of Nafta, which had been ratified in 1993, and the potential impact of China coming into the global trading system.
Trumka was concerned about a sudden flood of cheap labour into the global marketplace, and the effect it would have on American workers’ incomes and lives. “I told [the official] that the deals would kill us, and he agreed.” But the official said that after a while, “wages would start to go up again, and things would even out around the world”. When Trumka asked him how long this process of “levelling out” might take, he answered: “about three to five generations”.
Three to five generations. That’s a century in the lives of the communities and the people in question. Is it any wonder, then, that the average American worker, just as those in many rich countries, has begun to question globalisation? Or that nationalism and populism are on the rise? As Harvard professor Dani Rodrik, one of the few mainstream economists to challenge the received wisdom of his profession in recent years, argued in 2011: “Democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full.”