[lit-ideas] Re: Points to Ponder as We Plan Our Lives and Politics
- From: Eric <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2006 12:38:04 -0500
Here's another counter-Reichian perspective.
It states that: In this case, the “con” is
so-called “free trade,” which has oiled the
machinery through which corporations now glide
effortlessly around the globe in search of the
cheapest labor.
And it asks: why have we accepted the hustle?
Workers Of The Real World
Jonathan Tasini
July 20, 2005
Jonathan Tasini is president of the Economic
Future Group and writes his "Working In America"
columns for TomPaine.com on an occasional basis.
For the past 20 years, we’ve been barraged by a
relentless mantra: Education is the magic bullet
to survive in the global economy. Virtually every
politician, armed with rhetoric from academics,
tells American workers that, essentially, they are
too dumb to make it in the “New Economy.” Save
yourself, they exhort—go back to school. Prepare
yourself—get an advanced degree. But this is utter
nonsense.
Let’s talk about the real world. Today’s global
economy is about one thing: labor costs. If a
company can move to China to employ workers making
35 cents an hour—whoosh, they are gone from
America. High-tech jobs have been moving offshore
for years, first to places like Ireland, and now
to India. The world is awash in highly skilled,
highly educated and cheap workers.
The hard fact is that in virtually every industry,
foreign workers across the globe are increasingly
as skilled and productive as American workers.
India, for example, has a highly trained, highly
skilled workforce capable of pumping out new
software, industrial design and other new
technological innovations. In India, the starting
salary of a software engineer is about $5,000, and
senior engineers make $15,000; the country has at
least half a million information technology
professionals eager to work for wages that are a
fraction of the going rate here.
And China is on the verge of dispelling the notion
that it is simply the world’s manufacturer of
cheap goods. China will “soon be competing for the
higher value-added jobs that were once considered
the birthright of the industrialized world,”
writes Oded Shenkar in The Chinese Century.
No one is saying that education is a bad thing in
the abstract. And certainly it will help some
workers get a better job. But a degree in software
engineering is the wrong answer to the global
economy because it addresses the wrong
question—how do workers compete when skills are a
sideshow to the relentless hammering down of wages?
Even some proponents of so-called “free trade” are
starting to be more honest. Last year, Paul Craig
Roberts—a former high-level Treasury Department
official in the Reagan administration—and Sen.
Charles Schumer wrote in The New York Times that
the basic principles of “free trade” are being
undermined by the global economy. In the op-ed
entitled, “Second Thoughts on Free Trade,” the
self-described “free-traders” admitted that, as
technology and capital flash around the world on
the back of high-speed band-with, “…strong
educational systems are producing tens of millions
of intelligent, motivated workers in the
developing world, particularly in India and China,
who are as capable as the most highly educated
workers in the developed world but available at a
tiny fraction of the cost.” Their conclusion:
“While some economists and elected officials
suggest that all we need is a robust retraining
for laid-off, we do not believe retraining alone
is an answer, because almost the entire range of
“knowledge jobs” can be done overseas.”
Why have we been sold the “education is the
future” line? It’s the corporate version of the
hustler in Times Square who lures people into a
con game—you try to keep track of a pea as the
hustler shuffles three cups but, most times, of
course, you point to the wrong cup; you think
you’ve kept track of the target but, whoosh, it’s
gone…along with your 20 bucks.
In this case, the “con” is so-called “free trade,”
which has oiled the machinery through which
corporations now glide effortlessly around the
globe in search of the cheapest labor. But, that
unassailable economic truth has to be hidden or,
at least, tempered by some calming promise that
there is some positive alternative that awaits
every American worker. Otherwise, the truth would
stand nakedly exposed, endangering the grand
economic plan that unfolds as public and corporate
policy. Voila—education as fig leaf.
But, more important, why have we accepted the
hustle? I believe that part of the answer can be
found in our embrace of American exceptionalism.
How many times have you heard politicians of all
ideological stripes, as well as other community
leaders, proclaim that this country has the best,
smartest and hardest-working people in the world?
That line of thinking, of course, means that no
one should fear the economic future because we are
just better than everyone else. Anyone who stands
in the way of the New Economy—for example, by
resisting so-called “free trade”—is simply a
“protectionist” who is afraid of the future. And,
as a country, we have bought American economic
exceptionalism as another pillar of the larger
frame of patriotic fervor and national pride.
Of course, on further examination, it’s
preposterous to think that one nation has a
harder-working, smarter group of citizens. All any
collection of people need is the right set of
tools—which now are broadly deployed across the
globe. Today, the rallying cry of American worker
exceptionalism sounds hollow, a cheap slogan
tinged with racism and nationalism, and certainly
not appropriate to the real world.
By tossing off the notion that they are special,
American workers will realize that training and
education are neither problems nor solutions to a
global economic system based on wage competition.
And perhaps that clarity will drive U.S. workers
to see foreign workers not as their enemies or
competitors but as their allies who are caught in
the same economic vise.
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2005/07/20/workers_of_the_real_world.php
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