Workers Of The Real World

Jonathan Tasini

July 20, 2005

Jonathan Tasini is president of the Economic Future Group and writes his "Working In America" columns for TomPaine.com on an occasional basis.

For the past 20 years, we’ve been barraged by a relentless mantra: Education is the magic bullet to survive in the global economy. Virtually every politician, armed with rhetoric from academics, tells American workers that, essentially, they are too dumb to make it in the “New Economy.” Save yourself, they exhort—go back to school. Prepare yourself—get an advanced degree. But this is utter nonsense.

Let’s talk about the real world. Today’s global economy is about one thing: labor costs. If a company can move to China to employ workers making 35 cents an hour—whoosh, they are gone from America. High-tech jobs have been moving offshore for years, first to places like Ireland, and now to India. The world is awash in highly skilled, highly educated and cheap workers.

The hard fact is that in virtually every industry, foreign workers across the globe are increasingly as skilled and productive as American workers. India, for example, has a highly trained, highly skilled workforce capable of pumping out new software, industrial design and other new technological innovations. In India, the starting salary of a software engineer is about $5,000, and senior engineers make $15,000; the country has at least half a million information technology professionals eager to work for wages that are a fraction of the going rate here.

And China is on the verge of dispelling the notion that it is simply the world’s manufacturer of cheap goods. China will “soon be competing for the higher value-added jobs that were once considered the birthright of the industrialized world,” writes Oded Shenkar in The Chinese Century.

No one is saying that education is a bad thing in the abstract. And certainly it will help some workers get a better job. But a degree in software engineering is the wrong answer to the global economy because it addresses the wrong question—how do workers compete when skills are a sideshow to the relentless hammering down of wages?

Even some proponents of so-called “free trade” are starting to be more honest. Last year, Paul Craig Roberts—a former high-level Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration—and Sen. Charles Schumer wrote in The New York Times that the basic principles of “free trade” are being undermined by the global economy. In the op-ed entitled, “Second Thoughts on Free Trade,” the self-described “free-traders” admitted that, as technology and capital flash around the world on the back of high-speed band-with, “…strong educational systems are producing tens of millions of intelligent, motivated workers in the developing world, particularly in India and China, who are as capable as the most highly educated workers in the developed world but available at a tiny fraction of the cost.” Their conclusion: “While some economists and elected officials suggest that all we need is a robust retraining for laid-off, we do not believe retraining alone is an answer, because almost the entire range of “knowledge jobs” can be done overseas.” 

Why have we been sold the “education is the future” line? It’s the corporate version of the hustler in Times Square who lures people into a con game—you try to keep track of a pea as the hustler shuffles three cups but, most times, of course, you point to the wrong cup; you think you’ve kept track of the target but, whoosh, it’s gone…along with your 20 bucks.

In this case, the “con” is so-called “free trade,” which has oiled the machinery through which corporations now glide effortlessly around the globe in search of the cheapest labor. But, that unassailable economic truth has to be hidden or, at least, tempered by some calming promise that there is some positive alternative that awaits every American worker. Otherwise, the truth would stand nakedly exposed, endangering the grand economic plan that unfolds as public and corporate policy. Voila—education as fig leaf.

But, more important, why have we accepted the hustle? I believe that part of the answer can be found in our embrace of American exceptionalism. How many times have you heard politicians of all ideological stripes, as well as other community leaders, proclaim that this country has the best, smartest and hardest-working people in the world?  That line of thinking, of course, means that no one should fear the economic future because we are just better than everyone else. Anyone who stands in the way of the New Economy—for example, by resisting so-called “free trade”—is simply a “protectionist” who is afraid of the future. And, as a country, we have bought American economic exceptionalism as another pillar of the larger frame of patriotic fervor and national pride.

Of course, on further examination, it’s preposterous to think that one nation has a harder-working, smarter group of citizens. All any collection of people need is the right set of tools—which now are broadly deployed across the globe. Today, the rallying cry of American worker exceptionalism sounds hollow, a cheap slogan tinged with racism and nationalism, and certainly not appropriate to the real world.

By tossing off the notion that they are special, American workers will realize that training and education are neither problems nor solutions to a global economic system based on wage competition. And perhaps that clarity will drive U.S. workers to see foreign workers not as their enemies or competitors but as their allies who are caught in the same economic vise.