Although the proportion of production beyond the Triad of Europe, North America and Japan was high, and was indeed associated with international rather than local markets, it was confined to a few East Asian countries. At the same time, the "domestic" production workforce in the US continued to grow.21
In general, capital still finds it more profitable to locate itself in the regions which had industrialised by the mid-20th century. Workers may usually be better paid there, but a combination of established skill levels and existing investments in plant and infrastructure means they are also more productive, providing much more surplus value for the system than most of their poorer brothers and sisters in the Third World. This explains why the picture for most of Latin America in the 1990s was one of very slow average growth or stagnation, and for most of Africa of absolute decline.
The most important impact of offshoring and rising imports has not been their role in destroying jobs, but in helping employers to destroy workers' confidence in their capacity to defend conditions, wages and working hours.
A study by Kate Bronfenbrenner found that during the economic upturn of the 1990s American workers felt more insecure about their economic future than during the depths of the 1990- 1 recession. "More than half of all employers made threats to close all or part of the plant" during union organising drives. But afterwards "employers followed through on the threat and shut down all or part of their facilities in fewer than 3 percent" of cases.22 In other words, it is in the interests of employers to overemphasise how precarious jobs are in order to demoralise workers and lower the level of resistance. Those voices on the left who exaggerate that insecurity can add to that demoralisation, rather than countering it with a recognition of the counter-factors that provide workers with continued strength if they have the confidence to deploy it.
The evidence does not justify a picture of a uniform, relentless spread of precarious jobs. The crisis of the early 1990s did cause a substantial increase in "precarious" jobs in Western Europe. But that still left 82 percent in permanent jobs, as against only 1 8 percent in non-permanent jobs-a proportion that remained almost unchanged between 1995 and 2000. There has been a huge variation between countries,23 but a 2001 ILO study of Western Europe as a whole concluded that:
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