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November 1990, Vol. 113, No. 11
The European Community 1992 program and U.S. workers
Robert C. Shelburne and Gregory K. Schoepfle
The European Community's plan to create, by 1992, a single market permitting the free flow of goods, capital, and people among member countries has caught the imagination and interest of many in the United States. Numerous studies and conferences have investigated the potential impact of this plan, called EC 1992, on U.S. companies. Little attention, however, has been given to how U.S. workers are likely to be affected. To help fill this gap, and to raise explicitly some of the issues of concern to U.S. workers, the Bureau of International Labor Affairs of the U.S. Department of Labor, in conjunction with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, cosponsored a roundtable conference in March 1990 on "EC 1992: Implications for U.S. Workers." This conference brought together leading experts from the government, academia, business, and labor to discuss the topic of European economic, political, and social integration and its implications for U.S. workers. This report discusses the major themes that evolved during the conference.1
Overview
The conference opened with a review of the major areas of concern for the U.S. workers resulting from the EC 1992 program. The importance and interdependence of the economic relationship between the European Community and the United States was emphasized. Each is the other's main trading partner and largest source of direct investments. U.S. exports to the European Community account for nearly a quarter of total U.S. exports and support nearly two million jobs in the United States. Besides internal economic effects, EC 1992 will have international strategic implications: a united Europe will be able to assume more financial and political responsibility in the operation of the global economic system.
This excerpt is from an article published in the November 1990 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
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Footnotes
1 The five papers commissioned for
the roundtable conference, including a summary of the discussion after each session, are
available in Jorge F. Perez-Lopez, Gregory K. Schoepfle, and John Yochelson, eds., EC 1992: Implications for U.S. Workers, CSIS Significant Issues Series (Washington, Center for
Strategic and International Studies, 1990). Contributing authors to this volume are Thomas
L. Brewer, Duncan C. Campbell, Richard B. Freeman, Lawrence F. Katz, Michael C. Maibach,
and Stephen E. Siwek.
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