.... I think some of the best examples are the economic devastation wrought on low-skilled workers who have been victimized by so-called "living wage" or "fair trade" policies (like the farm workers who handle much of the food we import). These multinationals don't just say, "ok farmer, we'll increase our budget and you have to pay everybody more, we need those bananas". Their budgets stay the same and fewer workers get paid the higher wage while others lose their jobs. It's such a bad policy w/ clearly negative affects that I refuse to buy products with the Fair Trade stamp because it's literally ruining people's livelihoods.
get real, "living wage" and fair trade policies are recent developments; wages have been stagnating and declining since the 1980's, and only a handful of jurisdictions in the country have even passed living wage ordinances. you're just reaching for something "liberal" to blame because you're a hack. at least you didn't try to blame "affirmative action" as well, though, that's probably just because you didn't think of it yet.
this article makes a lot more sense to me. the thesis:
... But while the mystery of what killed the great American jobs machine has yielded no shortage of debatable answers, one of the more compelling potential explanations has been conspicuously absent from the national conversation: monopolization. The word itself feels anachronistic, a relic from the age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. But the fact that the term has faded from our daily discourse doesn’t mean the thing itself has vanished—in fact, the opposite is true. In nearly every sector of our economy, far fewer firms control far greater shares of their markets than they did a generation ago.
Indeed, in the years after officials in the Reagan administration radically altered how our government enforces our antimonopoly laws, the American economy underwent a truly revolutionary restructuring. Four great waves of mergers and acquisitions—in the mid-1980s, early ’90s, late ’90s, and between 2003 and 2007—transformed America’s industrial landscape at least as much as globalization. Over the same two decades, meanwhile, the spread of mega-retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot and agricultural behemoths like Smithfield and Tyson’s resulted in a more piecemeal approach to consolidation, through the destruction or displacement of countless independent family-owned businesses.
...
And don’t fool yourself that this process of monopolization affects only America’s working classes. What’s happened to down-market retail has happened to department stores as well. Think Macy’s competes with Bloomingdale’s? Think again. Both are units of a holding company called Macy’s Inc., which, under its old name, Federated, spent the last two decades rolling up control of such department store brand names as Marshall Field’s, Hecht’s, Broadway, and Bon March?. A generation ago, even most midsized cities in America could boast of multiple independent department stores. Today a single company controls roughly 800 outlets, in a chain that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
It's clear that effects jobs... especially at the corporate level, where you now have one HQ, one HR dept., one marketing dept., etc. Of course, there's an argument you can make for efficiency, but that argument shouldn't outweigh the need to preserve competition in the market. When competition disappears, the entire argument for efficiency is bogus. there's no need for a monopoly to be efficient, in fact, they are inefficient in the market... charging higher prices, and producing fewer goods. Consumers and workers lose, AND the new monopoly can use their market power to influence government regulation, and through their weight around affecting other industries as well.
There's another article I've read about how lax FTC anti-trust regulations have become, and with fewer employers around due to consolidations across industries, there are fewer jobs in existence. I can't find it now, but I remember something like how during the Nixon administration, the FTC opposed a merger of two radio station owners because it would've given them something like 3% of the national market... and these days Clear Channel controls not only several entire local markets, but has like 1200 stations nationally.
it's clear what the 800 lb. gorilla is in the room when it comes to job & wage stagnation.
