Global Shoes by Rose Simone

The last of the children's shoes made at a plant that exclusively manufactured them in Canada came off the production line two years short of new millennium.

These were shoes made for feet that will walk in the global marketplace, a place of many technological wonders, but also of growing divisions between the rich and those who provide services and products for the rich.

The children's shoe label, Bonnie Stuart, would continue. But after Canadian plant production shut down in 1998 in Kitchener, Ontario, all the shoes would be made offshore.

"It would have been our pleasure to manufacture shoes here for another 100 years, but the way the economy is set up, we couldn't," the plant's owner said, on the day the production line shut down.

There were once independent department stores that specialized in quality-made products, he explained. Now, huge international chains import poorer-fitting, mass-manufactured shoes from places like China, where an entire day's wages for a worker is less than a day's worth of legislated benefits in North America.

And so the 40 workers left on the Canadian line of Bonnie Stuart shoes became numbered among of hundreds of thousands of industrial workers throughout North America and Europe who have lost their jobs in the shifting sands of modern-day economics.

Despite occasionally giddy stock markets, and a few recent good contract settlements in some sectors of the economy, the middle class is not prospering in the global economy.

In both Canada and the United States, average wages after inflation fell several percentage points in the 1990s. Education doesn't account for the difference — young university graduates in numerous fields are among the most vulnerable to being forced into a succession of low-paying, part-time jobs with no benefits.

The largely female work forces in the pink collar clerical ghettos and in the public sector have especially taken the brunt of cutbacks in the midst of this so-called "booming economy."

Wage inequality has grown dramatically. The wealthiest 10 percent have taken nearly 90 percent of the profits from the stock market flights of fancy in the late 1990s.

In North America, consumer debt spending has kept the "Asian flu," the latest in a long series of global depressions, at bay.

But sooner or later, we will have to pay the piper. Leading economists and politicians have warned that day of reckoning will come.

Much has been written about this unfettered capitalism that is cannibalizing its own main artery, the middle class, and some possible solutions have been put forward.

There are those who argue that if enough of us make a priority of electing people who will stand up against free trade, deregulated marketplaces and public sector cutbacks, we could save jobs, maybe even reverse job losses.

But with free trade deals in place, and with large, important sectors such as the telecommunications industry now deregulated, it would be impossible for any one nation, acting alone, to suddenly reverse those decisions and act on the people's behalf without being subjected to severe capital backlash and economic penalties.

Others say that if, as individuals, we simply boycott chain stores and products, live simply and only buy local, we can bring down the global marketplace and return power to the individual and local levels.

But individuals acting alone in such a scattered and fragmented way are not a threat to the power and influence of global corporations. Individual consumer behaviour alone cannot stop ongoing mergers which result in a narrowing of choices. The fewer the choices, the less power consumers have.

So, if nation states have been rendered impotent for a fear of a backlash by capital interests, and if individuals acting alone are unable to change the underlying economic structure, what can be done?

Radical situations require radical solutions.

The time has come to begin the globalization of the one thing that hasn't been globalized in the global economy: democratic people power.

In other words, the formation of a democratic global government, with the power to impose and enforce global environmental legislation and to tax corporations and redistribute wealth in order to provide health care, education, subsidized housing and minimum incomes for all.

Global democratic government may seem crazy, impossible, perhaps frightening to those who distrust large institutions. But in the 21st century, it may be the only real way of managing what has been described as the "cancer stage" of capitalism.

We can't go back to the old system of strong nation states because technology has fundamentally changed the ease with which money and capital can flow across borders.

Postal carriers, secretaries and telephone operators are the most recent victims of this trend. They were made redundant or forced into lower wages by the growing use of e-mail, the Internet, voice-mail and automated long-distance telephone operator devices.

The new reality is a massive displaced labour force and not enough high-tech jobs to absorb them all.

Self-employment has worked out for some of the people forced out of their jobs, but in most cases, self-employment is not stable enough or well-paying enough to support average families.

The free-for-all on the Internet also means that for the cost of the Internet service, anyone can have access to the contents of a newspaper, courses offered up by an educational institution, or of a book or a favourite music CD. That's great on one level, but results in fewer paying jobs.

Technology is also making currency itself increasingly abstract and borderless. While it is true that the European common currency has stumbled on its way into existence, and experiments with digital or electronic cash have been slower to garner followers than proponents would wish, the fact is, these trends will inevitably accelerate in the new millennium.

The ease of global electronic communication will likely become faster and more advanced in the next decade. Nation-states and their currencies will become increasingly irrelevant.

These realities create troubling questions in the new high-tech global economy: How will we employ the majority of people? How do we pay them? How much? Where will the money come from?

All of this inevitably sets the stage for some form of global government.

So we really are down to two choices.

We can continue to live with a global neo-feudalistic government in which corporate kings set the agenda and we become their serfs. Or, we can work toward the establishment of a balance of power, with citizens of all nations having a voice in establishing equitable and effective world-wide environmental regulations, workplace standards and minimum wages.

A global government taxation body, along with rules to make incomes and profits globally transparent, would allow a redistribution of wealth that can then be funneled back into communities for jobs in health care, education, environmental projects, food co-operatives and non-profit housing projects.

There would be a way, for example, to provide a wage for the legitimate work of caring for a dying loved one at home, a form of labour that is currently unpaid.

Some say the idea of a global democratically-elected government body is an impossible dream.

But if it has been possible to develop complex international free trade agreements, with hundreds of pages of complicated legalities, surely it cannot be impossible to work out a global democratic government mechanism to allow a balance of power between ordinary citizens and this world of mammoth transnational corporations.

The move toward global democratic government could start with an international grassroots conference — one where ordinary workers and individuals could begin to establish their own "Agreements on the Treatment of the Planet and its Workers."

These agreements could then form the basis of a constitution that could then lead up to lobbying politicians and political parties in different nations to enact these agreements into law and to establish a governing body to uphold those agreements on a global scale.

Will tomorrow's children walk on a environmentally ruined, hostile and violent world of deep divisions between rich and poor? Or will they walk on a planet dominated by equality, fairness and opportunities for all?

Those are questions for us to answer. We make the planet that future generations of children will walk in.

They will walk in the shoes that we make for them now.

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