Trade and Worker Productivity

Here's my letter to the NYT on the op-ed by Alan Tonelson and Kevin Kearns:

Arguing for higher tariffs, Alan Tonelson and Kevin Kearns claim that the Labor Department is wrong to "deem any reduction in the work that goes into creating a specific unit of output, whatever the cause, to be a productivity gain" ("Trading Away Productivity," March 6).  These authors insist that, because American firms import increasing amounts of component parts for processing into final goods in the U.S....