“Your real competitive position in the world economy is coming to depend on the function you perform in it,” begins Reich’s critical analysis on the global division of labor.
He illustrates how the rapid advancement of communication and information technology has contributed to widening the gap between the rich and the poor in developed economies instead of bridging it using three boats: the first representing the routine producers who, he claims, are fast sinking due to competition from cheap labor in less-industrialized countries; the second representing the service sector—or as he prefers to call them, in-person servers—who are gradually sinking due to the advent of automatons and from the competition of routine producers who have been forced to shift into in-person serving due to retrenchment and lay offs; and the third, the rapidly rising symbolic analysts whose in-demand skills and insight gain for them wealth of unprecedented proportions. Indeed, there is no doubt that the new economic order brought forth by the information technology revolution has affected producers and consumers in the U. S. and all over the world both for better and for worse.
Reich provides ample example to illustrate this point, from the demise of America’s giant automobile producers to the growth of corporations engaged in outsourcing of data entry jobs from one poor country to another; However, Reich’s argument seems simplistic, being that one man’s bane is another’s boon.With the demonstration of how labor is made cheaper by outsourcing communication solutions to Manila instead of maintaining American employees in Kansas City, we are led to think that the global division of labor has become a boon for the third world and a bane for the more developed ones—or specifically, that America’s routine producers are losing their jobs to the routine producers of Thailand, Singapore, India, or the Philippines—without trying to explore how globalization has also created new markets for the routine producers and “core pyramids” of America whose products are now transported, sold, and bought in almost all corners of the world.While Reich waxes sentimental over the fact that “all Americans used to be in roughly the same economic boat” earning industry-competitive wages and enjoying the right to bargain collectively through unions, at the same time one senses a gloating tone when he discusses the ability by which some Americans are able to rake in scandalous amounts of money by simply thinking, analyzing, singing, talking, or designing. Put more simply, at how some are actually making millions simply by selling/ exporting themselves to a global market.It becomes clear, however, that by creating the three boats, Reich aims to successfully gloss over other issues that are necessarily entangled with poverty, Although he mentions the income disparity between American men and women, he does so only to assert that it was exactly through the decline in the wages of American men that women’s incomes leveled with their male counterparts.
Although he echoes the popular sentiment of women being clearly marginalized in labor, he fails to successfully augment his argument.In striking contrast is Virginia Woolf’s analysis in Professions for Women of why women are constantly hindered from pursuing successful careers in male-dominated arenas, in which she posits that women are constrained by the stereotypes that society has imposed upon her. Reich also attempts to skirt the issue of racial discrimination by making it seem that the second boat—the one composed of the service sector—is gradually sinking due to overcrowding. He points out to the increasing numbers of migrants as an additional competitor of in-person service jobs—aside from automatons, that is.
On the other hand, he refrains from discussing the factors that continue to make colored people in America—illegal immigrant or not—uneducated, low-skilled, and impoverished.Gates, in his essay “Delusions of Grandeur,” points out one reason why the black youth, majority of them dreaming to become among the symbolic analysts (by becoming professional athlete-celebrities), end up on the first or second boat instead: “Imbued with a belief that our principal avenue to fame and profit is through sport, and seduced by a win-at-any-cost system that corrupts even elementary school students, far too many black kids treat basketball courts and football fields as if they were classrooms in an alternative school system. ” The problem of racial discrimination is therefore similar to that of gender inequality: both box a particular sector from developing to their best.It seems then, that the only distances that globalization was unable to tear down were the most important ones: that of race, class, and gender. In the end, Reich’s main argument sounds pretentious: it seems he is attempting to make his readers understand poverty without really discussing the essence of being poor: probably that of being an uneducated, black woman who cannot be a writer like Woolf, and who is kept from pursuing a career by her society-dictated role as a mother and wife.
After reading Reich, one is therefore compelled to examine why a society—or a world, for that matter—that could afford to put millions in a product endorser’s bank account could also leave majority of its inhabitants in inhumane living conditions and facing the worst for survival.
