I suppose it started, like so much else, with the Beatles. Their
embracement of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to fulfill their spiritual
needs may have been the first known example of a Western economic
powerhouse outsourcing its software requirements to India. Now
everybody’s doing it.
I suppose it started, like so much else, with the Beatles. Their embracement of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to fulfill their spiritual needs may have been the first known example of a Western economic powerhouse outsourcing its software requirements to India. Now everybody’s doing it.
Five-hundred years after Columbus we have finally landed our trading vessels on the shores of the real India, and to retain historical symmetry we should probably dub its inhabitants Native Americans. Lord knows, they’re doing their best to get “American” down so pat that we can’t tell the difference. You’re probably aware that increasingly when you make or receive a call from some big company about your bill or your service or the product you bought from them, while you may think you’re talking to Mickey in Minneapolis you’re really talking to Raj in Raipur. And you can bet that Raj has a dead-on middle-American twang compared to which Garrison Keillor sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
That’s because they get accent lessons, and why not? The bottom line is, welcome to true globalization, where the cost of having a phone call to a local company instantly routed to Calcutta is a pittance compared to the savings in employee wages. They do the same job, they do it just as well, and they work in an environment where the cost of living is what ours was a hundred years ago. So what’s an American company to do – charge us through the nose because they employ American, or outsource to the Third World and be competitive? We’ve created a little problem for ourselves: We want cheap stuff, we want it to be American-made and we all want to make lots of money. Those things unfortunately don’t go together, and that’s the fact, Jack.
So when we look at the hubbub over things like the pro-union Gilroy First! and the non-unionized Walmart Superstore, which has caused a segment of the community to rail against the unions for driving prices up to a non-competitive level by successfully raising wages, well, that’s using a microscope when you need a telescope. There’s a much bigger picture here than the question of whether having Walmart engulf and devour a sizable portion of the local merchantry for the sake of low prices is a good or a bad thing. Walmart doesn’t keep costs down just by being a non-union shop; where is it buying all that low-priced stuff we’re so anxious to save money on? Or put another way, how much of our money are we willing to send elsewhere in order to save a buck? How many of your neighbors’ jobs are worth a bargain at a discount store? You can’t have it both ways, and blaming unions is just a handy form of denial.
Yup, the union movement has caused American wages to far outpace those in other countries, and yup, that rising tide has pretty much lifted all American boats. We all, union or not, have gotten fat and sassy with money and the goodies it can buy over the last 50 years or so, and now we’re facing lean and hungry competition from a world that’s catching up fast. The gravy train’s leaving town, folks, and we really should stop kidding ourselves about that.
Whoever’s president, whoever’s governor, whoever’s on the local planning commission, we’re going to need a plan to get us into the future without turning into an economic backwater of minimum-wage drones selling each other hamburgers.
Or in the alternative, we can all go down like the dinosaurs arguing about the past. Your call.
