The Balloon Pops
Listen! Do you hear that? It’s the sound of American jobs whooshing out
the window. Looks like the results of
this election will be another devastating blow for labor, perhaps the ultimate
blow. I’m talking about offshoring
again; the movement of American jobs overseas, because it really can’t be
talked about enough.
Bush’s position on offshoring has
been clear for many years, that he believes it is ultimately good for the
American economy. And it isn’t likely that
he’s going to change his mind any time soon.
One of the good points about
capitalism is that stagnation equals death, and a society that embraces it will
advance quickly to beat the competition to market. Since the Industrial Revolution, invention and
knowledge in America
have taken off like gangbusters. And it
existed within the North American microcosm, where barriers to trade (both
physical and informational) were many.
There was dismal poverty in our history, but we seem to have more or
less conquered it, relative to poverty in the undeveloped world. As we’ve moved up past slavery, industry, and
heavy manufacturing, we’ve finally created a superindustry of information in
which knowledge can instantly be sent across the globe cheaply, and is accessible
to just about everyone.
For a while, it was good, and
Americans flocked to these jobs. But
then greediness, which has defined the darker side of capitalism since the
beginning of it all, took advantage of this inexpensive data transmission and
realized that they could start employing sweatshop labor instead of
Americans. (Of course I don’t literally
mean sweatshop, I’m sure they have air conditioning.) All of a
sudden, the free flow of information and the advent of free trade have had an
unfortunate side effect – the barrier separating the American economy from the
outside is dropping more rapidly than ever before. The American balloon of prosperity is
popping, and the “Invisible Hand” is pushing all of the air straight out into
the vacuum that is the rest of the world.
The prosperity America
has built up is deflating through ever-widening holes, because though the
market is the best determinant of
what’s right for the world, the U.S.
economy was never meant to play in the same sandbox as these smaller ones.
It didn’t have to be this way. Restrictions on trade or incentives for
keeping jobs in America
could have stemmed this mass exodus. The
defenders of these offshoring practices will tell you that by employing
foreigners for slave wages, they’re helping the American economy by freeing up
our Information Technology work so that we can move on to higher things. And an economy should progress on to
different jobs, of course. But something
I saw in Wired
magazine made me think that our destiny for greater things is all a bunch of
hooey. It was one little sentence,
spoken by an American critic of outsourcing.
It was, “I’d like to know where you go from knowledge.” It’s true.
This offshoring phenomenon is happening far too quickly to spur real
advancement among the people who are displaced.
I mean,
really… where do you go? I can’t be
convinced that all of the people in America who used to be tax accountants,
computer programmers, and call center workers are going to be able to elevate
themselves to a higher calling in the workforce. Are we all going to become stem cell
biologists? Work to achieve nuclear fusion? Become CEOs and executives of sneaker
companies? Or any other of the “21st
Century Jobs” that Dubya has promised us?
No doubt, a person in India
can do an information job almost, if not as easily as an American, cultural
differences aside. Indeed, much as Henry
Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the assembly line, all business have
needed since those days are cogs in a great machine. An individual cog doesn’t have to know what
the machine does, just its own individual function. So now we have people overseas performing
previously American-held support roles, though they lack the skills to
communicate properly with customers, and their knowledge of American business
practices is sorely lacking. But hey,
they sure are cheap!! How do we know that
they can’t also do the new jobs that we will find to do once we’ve advanced?
Meanwhile,
back in America,
our lifestyles all of a sudden seem far too expensive to maintain, and it keeps
getting worse. Gas prices are
skyrocketing, healthcare is out of control.
Americans have just become too expensive, too overweight, too used to a
life of entitlements, consuming a quarter of the world’s resources. The trending toward true world equilibrium is
finally starting to put life back into balance, and it has a decidedly
bittersweet taste. Budding middle
classes in the lucky nations that receive outsourcing contracts are raising
standards of living elsewhere, and are doing very nicely for themselves.
The good news for Americans is that
once this worldwide equilibrium is reached, we’ll have stability again, and for
everyone else, world poverty may start to improve. The bad news is that there are hundreds of
millions of people who are dead-ass broke in this world, and it’s going to take
an enormously long time, perhaps centuries, before they can all start to afford
a cup of coffee at Starbucks after working for a full day. Once India
is oversaturated with IT work, we’ll move on to even cheaper nations. Hell, even India
will move on to cheaper nations to outsource the outsourcing.
Will Americans even be able to
afford luxuries such as Starbucks, or even our basic needs, once the wages that
we have come to depend on have been fully trumped by overseas competition? Given the speed offshoring has taken hold in
just the past two years alone, I shudder to think what might happen after
another four years of Bush administration negligence. The middle class will continue to erode at a
breakneck pace, consolidating power and wealth into ever fewer hands.
Sources:
Our Future, http://www.ourfuture.org/
The White House, http://www.whitehouse.gov/
