There's an article in today's Ottawa Citizen, originally in the LA Times, on what globalization, outsourcing and the international connectedness of work are doing to peoples' lives. The article says that all of the 46 million knowledge workers in the US are engaged in some form of "time-zone shifting", meaning that a considerable proportion of them would need to be in instantaneous connection with people living in far away places like India, China, Japan and Europe. This would not be a problem if the world were flat and the sun shone its daylight on all parts of it at the same time, but unfortunately night and day occur at different times in different parts of the world, meaning that workers on whom decisions depend have to remain connected both day and night. As the article suggests, this could play hell with both personal and family life.
The kind of work world the article describes raises some additional rather big-ticket issues. One is how workers who increasingly comprise a multi-national labour force might organize themselves to bargain in unison with their employers, given that each country has its own rules around such things. The outsourcing of both labour and production is likely to already have had a major negative impact on unions which, if one thinks about it, would have been strongly dependent on production taking place within a particular country and within a limited area of that country. Another issue is that of what might happen to a business that has spread itself over several countries if those countries became hostile to each other. And here the concern is not the possible loss of relatively independent branch plants, but the loss of vital parts of an internationally integrated knowledge based business. I couldn't access the article on the web, so I've scanned it and am attaching it as a PDF file. Ed
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