The Other Side of Globalization

I am passing on a portion of an article I read today online on Business Insider. 

"Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects.  It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations.  The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.

The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world.  After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job?  The world is fundamentally changing.  Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money.  Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool. "

I wanted to add that in the '80s, when those of us who were in college, were studying globalization, our antidote to this was to seek jobs internationally, thus giving rise to the culture of Urban Nomads. No question that we consider ourselves part of that "global labor pool." The problem is the older we get (most of us are now reaching or have hit our 50s), the more experience we carry, the less relevant we become to those increasingly in charge. The more overlooked and unemployed we become.

So not only is the "middle class" in trouble, but the aging group -- regardless of class -- is becoming a burden.

In essence our globalization and worldliness has screwed us out of enjoying the lives we expected to have but has made us healthy enough to live longer and wise enough to know we will have to live through it and adjust. 

Talk about backfiring!