Globalizátion: The irrational fear that someone in China will take your job

Chapter 3. Employment Trends for Globalization 3.0: Are All the Good Jobs Going Away?

Fifty years ago, a Kayser-Roth textile mill in Pittsboro, North Carolina, employed 400 workers making hosiery. The mill stopped producing textiles years ago, but the building is still occupied by a company doing manufacturing. Now, 90 workers are using sophisticated and expensive equipment in an effort to extract a drug for liver ailments out of duckweed. The lowest-paid technicians make considerably more than the textile workers ever earned, although there are many fewer of them. If the company succeeds in extracting the drug, its profits will be much higher than those Kayser-Roth achieved from turning out hosiery.^[22]

The transformation of this building, from textile mill to biotech facility, illustrates some of the changes in employment within the American economy over those 50 years: a shrinkage of lower-skilled manufacturing jobs, an increase of higher-skilled and better-paid technical jobs, and an anxious concern that the two trends will still leave many workers out in the cold, or at best serving up unhealthful fast foods to an already-obese population.

Recent History as a Guide

Of all the challenges that rampant globalization is thought to pose to economies in the developed world, nothing is more threatening than the loss of good jobs. There are regions in the United States where factory closings have been going on for decades. Even in areas less directly threatened, it is the cloistered person ...