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from - http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=402
The Digital Death Rattle of the American Middle Class:
A Cautionary Tale
Dion Dennis
Introduction
On the WASHTECH website, there's a reposting of a PowerPoint presentation given by Brian Valentine, a senior Microsoft VP. Valentine has a pronounced and unabashed penchant for dressing up his exhortations in banal mixed metaphors. Announcing that he's "Thinking About India ... Touchdown India," he asks microserfs one and all to note that "competitors already have this [outsourcing] religion." Therefore, it's high time for "Microsoft to join the party." Extolling the virtues of "2 heads for the price of 1," he presses middle manager microserfs to "leverage the Indian economy's lower cost structure," and to "pick something to move offshore today," as a tangible sign of their heartfelt personal and institutional fealty. [1]
It's a big moving party, indeed. Over the next decade, several million white-collar jobs, from financial services to hardware and software computer design, will be permanently exported to East Asia and other points in the developing world [2]. Inexpensive global communication networks, combined with a younger, talented and low-cost global workforce will reduce the demand for native U.S. intellectual labor. It's a well-documented phenomenon and perhaps the needed irritant for an incipient social movement here in the U.S. But the sheer plethora of young and talented workers (the Philippines alone produces 380,000 college graduates each year) in East Asia, willing to work for a fifth to a tenth of U.S. wages, may well render U.S. intellectual labor not economically viable, on the global stage, over this emergent present and well into the future. By the end of 2003, more than half of the Fortune 500 have shipped a significant fraction of their intellectual labor jobs offshore. And the exodus is accelerating. [3]
Concurrently, another trend may well be defining the future of U.S. intellectual labor. As U.S. states suffer from revenue shortfalls, and burgeoning college and university enrollments, large tuition increases are often bundled with escalations in class size, reduced course availability, and shrinking financial and infrastructural resources. [4] Combined with the concurrent neo-liberal political redefinition of higher education as a private rather than a public good, "sticker shock" one-year increases (of up to thirty-nine percent at the three public universities in Arizona, forty percent in the California State System, and thirty-two percent in the University of Texas System) [5] may well signify that elites are no longer willing to subsidize American public higher education, once they have gained global access, via digital communication networks, to cheap and competent intellectual labor. This essay explores the links between these two defining moments of early twenty-first Century America, with an eye on the possibility that affordable public higher education, and its attendant importance as a vehicle of social mobility, may soon be thought of as an artifact of the Twentieth Century. If so, we are witnessing the digital death rattle of the American middle class, and an escalating and intensive restratification of the American class system.
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full at -
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=402