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No room at the Inn … but maybe a job in the Outback

By Rebekah Kebede

You wouldn’t think you’d have to make hotel reservations months ahead of time in Karratha, a small, dusty town on the edge of the Outback  a 16-hour drive from  Perth, the nearest city. But with Australia’s commodities boom, Karratha is bursting at the seams and nowhere is it more apparent than when trying to find a place to stay.

(Above photo: A kangaroo stands atop iron ore rocks outside the remote outback town of Karattha in Western Australia. Reuters/Daniel Munoz)

About two weeks ahead of my trip up to Karratha, to do a special report on Australia’s hunt for foreign labour, all hotel rooms within a 60-km radius were fully booked and after more than 20 calls, the travel agent was still coming up empty.

A few more desperate calls turned up a couple of rooms in a town called Roebourne, about 30 minutes away from Karratha at the Ieramugadu Inn, an old motel, which like many others in the area, had become worker accommodations as Karratha struggles to house the influx of labour into town. The bill came to over $200 a night—just shy of what it costs to book a room with a view of the Opera House in Sydney.  The amenities at the Ieramugadu were somewhat different: a complimentary can of bug repellent, tin-foil covered windows to keep out the light for those on night shift, and a view of a truck parking lot through a hole in the tin foil.

An economic giant’s Achilles heel

A year ago, Nick Carey went on a road trip around America for a project called “Route to Recovery” that took him to places hit hardest by the recession. Nick went to Saginaw, Michigan, this time for a follow-up special report on the manufacturing sector and structural unemployment: “Is America the sick man of the globe?”

One of the characters he met was Olen Ham, a retired GM worker and UAW member who is among the last of those who took part in the historic “Sitdown Strike” in 1936 that he says helped create America’s middle class. You can hear from Olen in this video:

Manufacturing has borne the brunt of the lay-offs in recent years, as this graphic shows:

Here’s another graph that shows how unemployment and manufacturing are closely linked.

China’s rebalancing act puts consumer to the fore

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, now has 189 stories in China, according to its website. Soon it will have many more.  The U.S. chain has announced plans to open a series of “compact hypermarkets”, using a bare-bones model developed in Latin America, the Financial Times said.

Wal-Mart stores are a bit different than the one’s you might find in, say, Little Rock Arkansas. They sell live toads and turtles for one thing, The Economist reported. But they also sell the appliances, gadgets, and housewares that Wal-Mart stores merchandise everywhere.

And business is booming. Third-quarters sales in China soared 15.2 percent from a year earlier, according to the Financial Times story, compared with a paltry 1.4 percent inthe United States.

China’s consumption has been growing. Quite fast, in fact. Yet it still acounts for just a third of GDP, compared with around 60 percent in Europe and about 70 percentin the United States. But that is starting to fundamentally change. A Reuters Special Report by Alan Wheatley, “The Chinese Consumer Awakens” notes that wages are rising fast. People are moving into new cities in China’s vast interior, and manufacturers and retailers are following them. Call it China’s great rebalancing act, as the government tries to promote more consumption and rely less on cheap exports from “the workshop of the world” for future growth.

Timothy Geithner certainly hopes to see this. The U.S. Treasury Secretary is counting on hundreds of millions of Chinese to spend more and save less. That way, Chinese factories would produce more for domestic consumption and less for export, helping to narrow the trade imbalances that are destabilizing the global economy.

Photo caption: Chinese vegetable vendor sleeping in open air market in Changzhi, Shanxi province. REUTERS/stringer

Inside the Pirates’ Web

Reuters trade correspondent in Washington Doug Palmer had an unusual assignment: buy a fake Louis Vuitton handbag on the Internet, and take it to a LVMH store for a comparison test, before handing it over to U.S. authorities.

    What was startling was how easy it was to find websites selling a dazzling array of stuff online. This is the new face of piracy and its costing businesses billions.   No need to skulk around back alleys or some pirate’s rental van to browse through footwear, watches, DVDs and whatnot. Just pick out your LV shoulder tote from a virtual catalog on a website based in China. It looks and feels like the real thing at a fraction of the price.

Counterfeit goods ranging from shoes to software seized by the U.S. government  on display at the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center in northern Virginia, October 7, 2010.  REUTERS/Jason Reed  

    The bulk of these goods comes from China. The workshop of the world is also the sweatshop oif the world when it comes to making fake goods.

    Reuters Shanghai correspondent Melanie Lee and a photographer accompanied a private investigator to grubby neighbourhoods around Guangzhou to find the leather workshops that make these fake bags. She saw mothers and daughters through the windows working the leather, and young toughs outside serving as lookouts. Chinese authorities occasionally do raid these places, which are often run by triad gangs. Photographer Tyrone Siu stealthily took photos with his iPhone.

 Melanie and her PI then followed the trail of the fake handbags to an illegal market a few miles away. The Baiyun wholesale market, occupying a space equivalent to five football fields, is the biggest market for leather goods in the world. Much of the merchandise is counterfeit.

    The market is occasionally raided — including the day they went. But the shopkeepers are used to it. It’s like the Whack a Mole game. As fast as you can hammer down one operation, another one pops up somewhere else.

This is going to hurt

In Britain, the coalition government is readying its “comprehensive spending review” later this month. Rather than get caught up in chasing which government departments or bodies will be cut, two of our reporters focused on a single council – in this case, the City of Birmingham, which happens to be the biggest local authority in Europe – and explored what it’s doing to prepare for the change ahead.

For a lot of people, the most visible sign of cuts in Britain will be at a local level, as services are pulled back and jobs are lost. In the leadup to the spending review details,  lobbyists in London have been doing great business. Check out their tactics for survival – although if you’re worried about your government contract but haven’t done anything about it, you’re probably already too late.

Have Europe’s unions had their day?

Here in Europe, as spending cuts bite ever deeper, you might expect people to have taken to the streets in their thousands and be up in arms, in defence of the hard-won rights that this round of austerity is threatening. Some are, but not in anything like the numbers they have been in the past. With a Europe-wide day of action coming up on Sept 29 that may change…

But, so far at least, the most remarkable thing has been just how tame the strikes have been, how ineffective the unions look. Why is it that? Are Europe’s unions less powerful? Or less relevant? Sarah Morris in Spain and Gavin Jones in Italy found a host of reasons why young and old today are not rallying to the cause — and not just that they’re scared of losing their jobs.

In case you missed them

Just because it was summer, doesn’t mean we weren’t busy here at Reuters. Here are a few of our recent special reports that you might have missed.

Tracking Iran’s nuclear money trail to Turkey. U.N. correspondent Lou Charbonneau – who used to cover the IAEA for Reuters –  followed the money to Turkey where an Iranian bank under U.S. and EU sanctions is operating freely. Nice to see the New York Times follow up on this today, and the Washington Post also quizzed Turkey’s president about it.

Blue-collar, unemployed and seeing red – Chicago correspondent James Kelleher went on the road for this story about the long-term unemployed and what that means for Obama and the Democrats at November’s midterm elections.

Even though he’s been forced to move back in with his parents and has virtually no income, Stevenson opposes Obama’s proposal to let some tax cuts for the wealthy, dating back to George W. Bush’s presidency, expire at year’s end in order to raise revenue and reduce the deficit. 

“How is more people, keeping more of the money they earn, bad for the economy?” he said. “The answer is — it’s not.”