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Originally Posted by EGB_Hibs
A number of topics over the months have touched on this conundrum, so I thought feck it, let's tackle it head on.
How can the equally meritorious ambitions to ensure a decent living for domestic workers and providing the means for the developing world to escape poverty, be reconciled? Moreover, if they cannot, then what ought to be the priority?
If we take the 'teach a man to fish' principle as being a given for developing self-sustaining economies elsewhere (if anyone has any alternative suggestions let's hear 'em) then offshoring of industry to the developing world, means removing opportunites for domestic employment. For all the cynicism about globalisation, there is as I see it, considerable evidence that countries that start off hosting less skilled jobs, with good governance, can and do proceed to take on more specialised work. The south east asian economies are of course a good example of this, but india is another - what is starting with call centres will soon end up with india as a dominant player in world technology markets.
For all that their are exploitative practices going on here and there, if these can be sorted out, it still remains very much the case that foreign workers can be paid what are, by local standards, very good wages, and still massively undercut the domestic workforce.
How then do we balance the internationalist goal of improving conditions for the poor of the world, without driving down wages on the home front, or even creating unemployment? The market-darwinist answer is of course that exporting what have become commodotised activities, should result in new jobs being created domestically that have more 'added value'.
I see a couple of problems with this however (and I'm sure others will see more):
a) Added-value, in this context, usually although not always, implies skilled or specialised work. We will always have a section of the workforce who will find it difficult to keep up with the demands this poses in terms of acquiring new skills, so what happens to them?
b) Secondly, if we look at things at a very high level, there is not that much new under the sun. Most commercial activity, whether of hard or soft goods, has similar components: manafacturing, infrastructure, sales and marketing and servicing. Manafacturing is already something we've largely exported, infrastructure - which in large parts these days means IT and telecoms - is on the way out, as is servicing. That only really leaves sales and marketing, which is not much to be going on. What I'm saying is that unless there is another transformative change round the corner akin to industrialisation or the dawn of IT and global telecomms, I'm struggling to see where the domestic labour force can retain an edge that keeps it ahead of cheaper labour overseas.
The other side of this is of course bringing the labour to industry rather than moving the industry to the labour, through mass migration. While this provokes different political responses, the dynamics are essentially the same, if perhaps not so acute: cheaper labour has the potential to drives down wages, not to mention returning migrant workers removing money from the domestic economy.
So, what do we do? This seems a really thorny problem to me tbh. It's partially mitigated by our shrinking population, which of course brings it's own problems (but for this thread let's leave that aside) but to far too small an extent to be decisive I expect.
I hope this thread provokes debate cos it will be interesting to see, for example, a left of centre take from Al or Gareth, versus (perhaps) ColR's free market approach.
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