[lbo-talk] World Economic Forum Weeps Bitter Tears For Lost "FirstWorld" Jobs

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Mon Jan 26 11:03:32 PST 2004


Ian wrote:

I'm really beginning to wonder how much of this constant focus on outsourcing by the press, relative to the actual scale of the phenomena vis a vis employment in the 'hi-tech' sectors etc., isn't just a great big Gramscian mind-fuck-war-of-position being played on 'knowledge workers' to keep 'em anxious and paralyzed.

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Surely this is one of the motivations.

And, it is not possible to offshore all such labor so the threat of a total disappearance of 'knowledge work' in the US is zero.

But still, we are at the beginning moments of what might prove to be a powerful (numerically and psychologically) phenomena. Many workers have direct experience of losing a job or witnessing friends and co-workers lose jobs due to corporate migrations to cheaper locales - there is ground truth here as well, not merely shadows on a cave wall.

Indeed, the firm I work for has lost lucrative programming projects to international competition because the competitor's labor cost is so much lower. With sinister steadiness, the company is working to become a gateway body shop for talent located in India, the Phillipines, China...

In-house programmers are nervous, no raises will be requested. How far will these plans go? Who knows. The potential is quite real however.

So yes, right now, the numbers are small. But everyone knows that once upon a time there was a large and prosperous American television industry and now there's a large apetite for televisions made someplace else.

Everyone knows that once upon a time millions upon millions worked in auto plants and other parts of the industrial sector and now many fewer millions do.

The initial numbers were small in these areas too.

Everyone agrees that Capital uses the threat of offshoring to hold a gun to workers' heads. The trouble, as I see it, is that some believe the gun is armed only with blanks. From where I sit, it's being loaded, slowly but surely, with real ammo and should be taken seriously.

DRM



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