For instance, if you run a business, and your competitors are off-shoring which drives their costs down and allows them to sell goods or services more cheaply, how do you stay in business?
Well, it would be nice if you had concerned customers who were enlightened to the evil side effects of some types of improvements in organizational efficiency (a.k.a. exploitation ... great word choice, thanks Shaun!) and consistently forswore goods manufactured with child labor, in sweat shops, by laborers unable to organize for better working conditions...or services bid out to the cheapest workers around the globe...
Taking services to the cheaper workers around the globe, I don't think is an immoral act. Hey, if someone says they can do work for less, great. I get concerned though when I think of what cost that happens at. Perhaps the company they work for has no health care, like we do here? Perhaps the company they work for demands longer hours (and less time with their family) from their salaried workers to get the job done. Perhaps, as one article mentions, there is no A/C in the office during the hot season...
In that same article, a perceived positive of off-shoring was that it would force U.S. workers to move more into the knowledge worker realm rather than just the manual labor realm. Lucky for me, I have the advantage of reading that article 6 years after it was written for one of the premier business schools of the U.S. I am a knowledge worker and my job is being shipped overseas increasingly. So that kind of falls flat.
Additionally, I think that at some point, if EVERYONE is a knowledge worker and NO ONE actually makes anything...where are we at? I read a Harper's Magazine April ed. article the other day. It was called "Infinite Debt" and was written by a labor lawyer from Chicago named Thomas Geoghegan. I thought it was an interesting take on the current financial crisis. I'm going to quote from a few pieces.
Oh, we had jobs and even jobs that required college and postgraduate educations. But we stopped being skill-based workers. We became "knowledge workers," dependent on the financial sector. And knowledge workers, unlike skill-based workers, don't have the bargaining power to get higher wages out of rising productivity. What can they withhold? They can't withhold knowledge. And since they have nothing to withhold, ti's much trickier for knowledge based workers to get a higher wage. And if there are fewer skill-based workers, it become hard to raise wages in general. And if it's harder to raise wages, then more of us go into debt. [My one comment on that is that I don't feel I've reached a point where I can't bargain for a higher salary, although with the current economic situation that is certainly difficult.]That may seem like somewhat of a detour...but I think it goes to my point that if we all become knowledge workers, and no one actually produces anything we will engender problems to arise. It seems as though some sort of mix may be appropriate...but how best to arrive at that mix?
... Joseph Schumpeter...long ago criticized the theory of what he called "the vanishing investment opportunity. which attempted to explain why the global economy had come to a halt in the 1930s. The theory was that capitalism required a constant stream of new products to invest in, and once that stream ran out, capitalism would collapse. But Schumpeter was certain that the supply of new things to bet on would never run out, because technology and capitalism's inherent creative dynamics, would always provide another investment opportunity. Of course he was writing about the manufacturing sector. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, his most famous work, he barely mentions banking, which has come to dominate our system. And with no cap (on interest rates), with no limit on the bloat, the financial sector faces the same problem as manufacturing, - especially now that it has managed to extract all of the value from manufacturing. That is, the financial sector constantly needs new "products." So we came up with more derivatives. We had always had futures, but now we had futures about futures. We have long had futures on the weather; for example, there is a weather index. But now we have futures on the weather futures. These are the "products" not widgets, etc. that our form of financial capitalism makes. That is what our country makes now: new products on which to place our bets."
It's hard to come down cleanly on one side of the other though for at least two reasons. First, I do see progress over in India (e.g.) where salaries are coming up thanks to all the tech off-shoring that has happened in the last decade. At least, the salaries are coming up for the small percentage of workers able to participate in the tech revolution there (keeping in mind that anywhere from 28-40% of their population live in poverty). Second, on a personal level, how many of us are willing to pay more for quality goods or services when a much cheaper version is readily available? I think I would be tempted towards the cheaper version first. Actually, I know I've done that. Many, many times. For instance, in the past I've downloaded pirated music. I still drink Coca-Cola despite having worked in Colombia with Christian Peacemaker Teams and heard about the exploitation of the workers there by groups with direct or indirect attachments to the large soda drink maker.
That's perhaps the more difficult obstacle. I do think that falling prices can be good as we improve operational efficiencies (get better at what we do)...but sometimes the shortcuts towards those improvements in efficiency are what I think we as individuals and organizations need to be wary of.
Perhaps it's a Lenten timing, perhaps it's a general direction I'm angling for...perhaps it's the friends I surround myself with at times...some and all...I do think I (we) can do more to consciously change the habits of purchasing goods and services.
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