A question from Yahoo! Answers:

When is international trade a threat for workers?

It’s not. The greatest threat for workers is technology, which makes their skills obsolete and replaces them with machines.

The world as a whole is losing manufacturing jobs. The highest rate of manufacturing jobs loss between 1995 and 2002 was observed in Brazil (19.9%), Japan (16.1%), and China (15.3%). U.S., South Korea, and Britain fared slightly better (11.3%, 11.6%, and 12.4% respectively).

In the U.S., manufacturing share or GDP remained relatively constant (16-18%) since 1960, while its share of non-farm employment dropped from 27.7% in 1962 to 11.5% in 2002.

Another threat is demographics. Aging of population means that more and more people shift their buying away from homes, cars, and gadgets towards long-term care. The job market is beginning to reflect this; in California, the fastest-growing occupations include home health aides and nursing home aides, whose average pay barely exceeds $20,000 a year…