Working from home ... in Chennai and Chengdu

For more than three months, many of the employed have been working from home (WFH.)  Is this working out well?

To answer that, let's check in with the wealthiest people in whose direct or indirect employ are people working from home.  If WFH has not affected productivity, then those wealthy people would have benefited, right?

Guess what?  Those gazillionaires have handsomely profited: "U.S. billionaire wealth surges to $584 Billion, or 20 percent, since the beginning of the pandemic."

Overall, between March 18—the rough start date of the pandemic shutdown, when most federal and state economic restrictions were in place—and June 17, the total net worth of the 640-plus U.S. billionaires jumped from $2.948 trillion to $3.531 trillion, based on the two groups’ analysis of Forbes data. Since March 18, the date Forbes released its annual report on billionaires’ wealth, the U.S. added 29 more billionaires, increasing from 614 to 643. During the same three months, over 45.5 million people filed for unemployment, according to the Department of Labor.
The top five billionaires—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett and Larry Ellison—saw their wealth grow by a total of $101.7 billion, or 26%.

Incredible, right?

It is no wonder that tech companies are looking at making permanent a great deal of WFH.  Think-tanks like Brookings immediately sensed an opportunity for those tech workers to get away from the expensive real estate like the Silicon Valley and move to the remarkably affordable interior of the country. 

Suddenly, it looks as if the COVID-19 pandemic could allow not just localized telework, but a more fundamental dispersal of America’s highest-value employment away from large “superstar” metro areas and into the lower-priced American heartland.

Not so fast.

If WFH has not affected company bottom-line, then why should the geographic dispersal be restricted only to within the US?  Companies might as well hire employees in, say, India, and have them work from their homes there instead of bringing them here to the US.  We could easily see a footloose economy on steroids!

A responsible policymaker might then look at these developments and begin to worry that big tech, which has brought wealth and power to the US, could easily start creating a whole bunch of satellite offices around the world.  Well, tRump is no responsible guy--he has proudly stated that he takes no responsibility.  So, it is no surprise that he announced a freeze until the end of the year on work visas for foreign labor.

So, let's recap.  WFH is doing well as a practice.  WFH has not affected productivity, and the big tech employers are reaping huge profits.  Many of the tech employees are foreign born.  tRump wants to prevent them from coming here.  Connect the dots yourself.

Or, read Shikha Dalmia's commentary:

high-skilled foreign workers that blue states like California, Washington, and New York depend on are out of luck. What is likely to happen in these states? Will they rush to hire Americans with big bucks in hand? Not really.
For starters, there just aren't enough high-skilled Americans sitting around to be hired. The unemployment rate last month—the peak of the pandemic—for computer jobs was 2.5 percent compared to the overall rate of 13.3 percent for all jobs, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy.
So as high-tech companies are choked off from hiring foreign workers, they'll start outsourcing more operations abroad.

If you prefer a "sound bite," Dalmia offers this:

The more Trump tries to turn America into a fortress, the louder will be the sucking sound of jobs fleeing overseas, to use the immortal words of failed presidential candidate Ross Perot.

As I wrote in this essay in Professional Geographer, in 2018, even the President of the United States cannot create an alternative facts of economic geography.

In sickness and in health

A few Decembers ago, when I was visiting with my folks in India, the maid came a tad later than usual and set about her tasks.  She started coughing.  My father told her that it was ok not to show up for work as long as she called and gave them a heads up.

But, there is a reason that maids and other workers report to work even when they are not well, or well enough: In most cases, they will suffer a cut in their earnings if they don't show up for work.  It is only a fraction of the labor force in India that has the benefits of sick leave and paid vacations.

Now, superimpose on such a framework the possibility of a viral disease. An epidemic, like COVID-19.  The scenario easily unfolds in your minds too, eh.

The US is only marginally better.

Service industry workers, like those in restaurants, retail, child care and the gig economy, are much less likely to have paid sick days, the ability to work remotely or employer-provided health insurance.
The disparity could make the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory illness known as Covid-19, harder to contain in the United States than in other rich countries that have universal benefits like health care and sick leave, experts say. A large segment of workers are not able to stay home, and many of them work in jobs that include high contact with other people. It could also mean that low-income workers are hit harder by the virus.

It is a large labor force without sick leave:

For many workers, being sick means choosing between staying home and getting paid. One-quarter of workers have no access to paid sick days, according to Labor Department data: two-thirds of the lowest earners but just 6 percent of the highest earners. Just a handful of states and local governments have passed sick leave laws.
Only 60 percent of workers in service occupations can take paid time off when they are ill — and they are also more likely than white-collar workers to come in contact with other people’s bodies or food.

And, yes, they are the ones who interact a lot with other humans, unlike the app-developing software engineer who tries his best to not deal with fellow human beings!  The low-wage and part-time workers in the US are, thus, in a situation similar to that of the maid at my parents' home:

for the average worker without paid sick-leave access, the lost wages associated with staying home for about three days would amount to their household’s entire monthly grocery budget or monthly utilities budget.
The outlook can be similarly bleak for gig workers for, say, a rideshare company or food-delivery service — many of whom aren’t eligible for benefits that would allow them to stay home and receive health care when they’re sick,

It is not difficult to understand how the virus has already spread far and wide, right?

Can anything be done?

Expanding the law to include pandemics as major disasters – as some lawmakers have urged – would make it possible for the president to make sure individuals affected by an outbreak have the support they need.
It would only take small changes like these to make the unemployment insurance program more useful to those sick, quarantined or temporarily idled during a pandemic.
While this will not solve all the economic problems caused by COVID-19, or the next pandemic disease, it would give American workers and the broader economy a lot more breathing room.

Giving workers a lot more breathing room is what I have often argued as the urgent need to rework the social contract and implement a stronger safety net.  If only 63 million Americans cared!

Source

A prime post about Amazon

A few years ago, when talking with a student, I asked him about his part-time job.  I knew he worked for UPS for a few hours every week.

He had quit UPS.  Which is when he said something that I found to be interesting.  He said that he would never get hired again by UPS because he quit.  Apparently UPS's policy is comparable to that of the husband who throws out his wife after her first known affair. UPS gave him a chance to work there, but he left.  So, UPS does not ever want him back.

That day my respect for UPS went up. A lot.

And then two years ago, I read this at one my favorite sites:

It might seem strange, but UPS delivery vans don’t always take the shortest route between stops.

Of course it intrigued me.

UPS have moved away from trying to find the shortest route and now look at other criteria to optimise the journey. One of their methods is to try and avoid turning through oncoming traffic at a junction. Although this might be going in the opposite direction of the final destination, it reduces the chances of an accident and cuts delays caused by waiting for a gap in the traffic, which would also waste fuel.

How about that!

Driving and delivering is serious business.  And fraught with perils.

Which is why Amazon uses unregulated businesses that don't care about their drivers or others.

UPS and FedEx, the traditional powers of the logistics world, are deeply invested in safety. ... Both firms are also heavily regulated by the government, and many of their trucks are subject to regular federal safety inspections and can be put out of service at any time by the Department of Transportation.
But Amazon’s ingenious system has allowed it to avoid that kind of scrutiny. There is no public listing of which firms are part of its delivery network, and the ubiquitous cargo vans their drivers use are not subject to DOT oversight.

There is no free lunch--there is a hidden cost to every damn thing.

Amazon denies any responsibility for the conditions in which drivers work, but it has continued to contract with at least a dozen companies that have been repeatedly sued or cited by regulators for alleged labor violations, including failing to pay overtime, denying workers breaks, discrimination, sexual harassment, and other forms of employee mistreatment.

I have always refused Amazon's offer for Prime.  I have never ever felt that I needed to have anything that urgently.  If ever there is an urgency, I drive over to the nearest store for whatever it is that I need it that badly.  When people--family or friends or students--talk up Prime, I nod my head and move on.  No point debating with them.  No point in sharing these kind of articles also with them!

[The] Sprinter-style vans Amazon requires its delivery providers to use weigh several times more than most passenger cars, they fall just under the weight limit that would subject them and their drivers to Department of Transportation oversight, unlike most FedEx and UPS trucks.
In a sign of how business is booming, Amazon last summer bought 20,000 of these vans from Mercedes-Benz to be leased, through fleet managers, to its dedicated delivery companies around the country.

The business of big business is about business--not about humans!  Dumb fucks we are!

Let's go, people!

I went to graduate school because I thought that I would find answers to the pressing questions of development.  Within a couple of years, I realized that plenty of highly capable thinkers had already thought up everything that I was worried about.  If everything had already been discussed, then what the hell?

I started understanding that addressing the human condition was not really about finding technical solutions.  Instead, it came down to the power of persuasion and, ultimately, politics.  I would no longer be fooled by fancy-shmancy data-driven models.

Which is also when I seriously started thinking about persuading others through easy to understand approaches.  One of the big topics then was free trade, and NAFTA in this part of the world.  I did not oppose free trade, especially after my experiences in the socialist India.  But, my logic told me that freely moving goods and capital alone merely provides advantages to those who are better-off.  I wanted free movement of people also. 

I went to talk about this with one of the professors.  He disagreed with me.  He gave me the same old textbook argument of how the movement of capital will counter and complement the controls on movement of labor.  I was not convinced.  I wrote an essay and sent that to Economic and Political Weekly.  Of course it was not published--I bet that it was one horribly written essay, stylistically and content-wise.

Over the years, I have been more convinced than ever that globalization ought to include freer, if not completely free, movement of labor.  Yes, I know that this exactly what the fascist thug campaigned against and for which he was rewarded with 63 million votes.  But, hey, the fascist can and will bullshit and lie.  But, the truth cannot be simply tweeted away.

One of the best contemporary thinkers on the distributional aspects of globalization, Branko Milanovic, whom I have quoted before, writes this:

income gaps are unlikely to be eliminated. Which, in turn, shows the importance of migration.  If a borderless cosmopolitan world is to be achieved (an objective with which I agree but see enormous political difficulties in reaching it), migration is absolutely essential. But as economic migration faces increasing obstacles in rich countries (and, it has to be added, not solely because of xenophobia but for economic reasons as well), the ideal of a world “without injustice of birth” recedes.

Yes, the injustice of birth.  Click here if you need a refresher on that.

Milanovic concludes:

I am very sympathetic to the borderless world but to believe that it can be achieved through trade alone, and without significant migration, is unrealistic. And once we say “migration”, we immediately open the Pandora’s box that the most recent elections in Europe and the United States have shown is a reality, not an imagination. Thus, our new “intellectual revolution” should be rather to address the issue of migration and citizenship than free trade. Free trade alone cannot solve world’s problems.

We need to think about migration and citizenship in new ways.  And we need to be able to think about that while dealing with the fascist thug's tweets and rants channeling his narrow and nativist takes on migration and citizenship.  Eventually, in the long run, truth will prevail.  But then, we need to also keep in mind that wonderful line: In the long run we are all dead.

On immigrants and refugees in trumpistan

Soon it will be the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.  But then, every day has seemed long like the longest day ever since the disastrous November election.

The president campaigned on various hateful themes, including putting an end to Muslim refugees and to undocumented immigrants. Those themes, and more, won him the few votes that made all the difference in states like Pennsylvania where Hillary Clinton got 2,926,441 votes versus 2,970,733 for trump.  A difference of 44,292 votes.  Clinton's share was 47,46% of the votes cast, and trump's was 48.18%  The winner-take-all electoral votes went to trump.

How are things in trumpistan?

Immigration law is being enforced more aggressively. Out in rural Pennsylvania, in a county Donald Trump carried with 66% of the vote, this is already having a devastating effect on the economy and culture.

That is from an uber-left publication?  Nope; it is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal!

Beautiful as it is, York Springs is the sort of place people leave after they finish high school. When I moved here in 2012, real estate was cheap and abandoned houses dotted the back roads. The town was aging and dying, though Mexican newcomers were already bringing green shoots. Over the past five years I’ve seen a steady renewal. Townspeople have fixed up many old houses and are raising families.
There has been a little tension, but York Springs in recent years has developed a vibrant, intersectional culture, insofar as that’s possible in such a sparsely populated place.

And then the elections happened.

This stringent enforcement of immigration law is destroying a rich, new rural culture. It’s likely to destroy the economy, too. The orchards generate over $500 million a year, and, one way or another, most of the jobs. But the local growers, many of whom have been operating the family orchards for generations, worry they won’t have enough manpower this fall to harvest the crop.
Sure, a lot of the white folk out here voted for Mr. Trump. Even then, many of them had reservations specifically about his immigration stance. I heard them expressed by Trump supporters in line to vote at the Latimore Township building. Now as we spiral into a local depression that is personal, cultural and economic, a lot of them are going to regret voting for him anyway.

An hour away from York Springs is Lancaster, deep in the Amish country.  This area too was won by trump.  What I didn't know until today is this, which I came across in my Twitter feed:

Lancaster, PA, hosts more refugees per capita than any other place in USA. And they raise money for the work via... square dancing parties! pic.twitter.com/HqwI7OuaaX

— Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) June 11, 2017

The ever doubting me did a quick Google search.  It is true.  Like in this news report from a couple of months ago:

Here in Lancaster County, a politically conservative area well known for its Amish community, traditional Christian values run deep. Since the Church World Service opened a Lancaster office 30 years ago, it has been a favored destination for resettling refugees because churches here easily assemble welcome teams whose members see it as a godly duty to care for those in need.
In the last fiscal year, Lancaster County resettled more than 400 refugees from all over the world, with the largest numbers coming from the Congo and Syria.

For once, I hope that the white supremacist British bastard, aka Churchill, was correct when he said that Americans will do the right thing after they exhaust all other possibilities.  After electing trump, there is nothing worse that we can do.  Here is to hoping that better days are ahead.

But, of course, hope alone won't change the world.  So, I did the next best thing that I could: I donated.

Foreigners for five-stars ...

A couple of days ago, I read this short story in the New Yorker.   It felt so real.  I could easily picture in my mind the characters portrayed there, and their circumstances and emotions.

I then read the interview with the author, Sherman Alexie.  He says:

This story began as a reaction to the Trump election, in general. But, in particular, I was angry that I could be thought of as being part of the “liberal élite.” Even inside the literary world, I did not follow an élite path. I am a poor, public-school kid who got lucky. The only non-minimum-wage job I’ve ever had is writing. And writing is a minimum-wage job for most writers. So, yeah, I grew up in poverty and worked as a doughnut maker, pizza man, dishwasher, secretary, and janitor.

We are all a bunch of angry people now expressing, in our own ways, our extreme displeasure with this president and his 63 million voters.  I rant in my blog, post on Facebook, and tweet, while Alexie channels his emotions via fiction.  I suppose there is nothing new in that fiction is often borne out of real life experiences; but, to understand it unfolding in real time is pretty darn new to me.

I wanted to honor the physical, emotional, and spiritual strength of a blue-collar worker—of a woman in the service industry. I also wanted to write about a poor white person who, contrary to societal assumptions, is a kind and empathetic person. I grew up with tons of poor white Christian conservatives, but I also knew, and know, a few poor white liberals. So, yeah, I enjoy being the Native American writing favorably about poor white liberals in the pages of The New Yorker.

I don't want to write about the story itself, other than remarking that it is about a maid in one of those cheap motels.  Those cheap motels, too, have a hard time with finding workers who will clean the rooms.  In addition to the wage, there is an important reason for why there is this problem: It is hard, menial work.

On top of this being hard and menial, add a layer of seasonality.  Of course, Americans are not lining up to do that work.  Which is why even trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla, hires foreigners to do the job.  Remember this post?

So, now we have a trump administration that is clamping tight the importing of workers.  And it is beginning to affect even the five-star hotels in resort destinations like Mackinac Island:

So at the Iroquois Hotel, a Victorian property on the waterfront where rooms command up to $1,200 a night, the owner is trying to figure out how to maintain its high standards without 30 Jamaican housekeepers. Other hotels are contemplating closing off whole sections. Even those who own the ubiquitous horses are wondering if they will have enough workers.

You remember that in my previous post on these visas, I referred to my experiences in Alaska?  Yes, problems there too: Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, says that a “short-term fix is urgently needed.”  Good luck on that, Senator!

All kinds of businesses, from Alaska to Maine to Texas, are now feeling the trump squeeze on the seasonal labor H2 visa.

Phil Harrington, the sous chef at Yankee Rebel Tavern, has been coming in at noon instead of 3 p.m. to make sure preparations are complete before dinner guests arrive.
“With the shortage of visas, it’s more stress on me and others who have to work longer hours to do more of the grunt work,” he said while chopping herbs, a task usually relegated to foreign workers. Patti Ann Moskwa, the owner and a fourth-generation restaurateur, has been washing dishes herself.
“This is a legal program to supplement American workers,” she said of the visas. “We aren’t taking jobs from anybody.”

I wonder how many of the people complaining voted for trump, who is the very source of the problem. I am sure that trump's Mar-a-Lago is able to get the visas it needs for its temporary workers.  And, I am equally sure that his 63 million voters don't care a shit!

Too bad I don't know how to channel into fiction my anger at trump and his voters!

The future has arrived ... Robot Appleseed

It seems like forever that I have been writing here, and talking in the classrooms, about how the modern day automation is a huge job-killer and a contributor to income inequality.  And, therefore, why we need to rethink public policies.  The newspaper gives me more material evidence:

Harvesting Washington state’s vast fruit orchards each year requires thousands of farmworkers, and many of them work illegally in the United States.
That system eventually could change dramatically as at least two companies are rushing to get robotic fruit-picking machines to market.
The robotic pickers don’t get tired and can work 24 hours a day.

Yes, robots picking apples.

The anti-immigration folks can yell and scream all they want about the "illegals" in this country.  But, those illegals are also the ones working our farms, our yards, our hotels, our cows, our ... If that labor supply were to be choked off, it is not as if the apples will harvest themselves and miraculously get to the nearest grocery store!

Enter automation.  It is the same automation dynamics that have also led to severe job losses in manufacturing.  But, I don't want to digress; I want to stay focused on the farm.

“Human pickers are getting scarce,” said Gad Kober, a co-founder of Israel-based FFRobotics. “Young people do not want to work in farms, and elderly pickers are slowly retiring.”
FFRobotics and Abundant Robotics, of Hayward, Calif., are racing to get their mechanical pickers to market within the next couple of years.
Harvest has been mechanized for large portions of the agriculture industry such as wheat, corn, green beans and tomatoes for some time. But for more fragile commodities like apples, berries, table grapes and lettuce — where the crop’s appearance is especially important — harvest is still done by hand.

Did you catch that?  "Israel-based."  If only people understood that economic geography is global!

While financial details are not available, the builders say the robotic pickers should pay for themselves in two years. That puts the likely cost of the machines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
FFRobotics is developing a machine that has three-fingered grips to grab fruit and twist or clip it from a branch. The machine would have between four and 12 robotic arms, and can pick up to 10,000 apples an hour, Kober said.
One machine would be able to harvest a variety of crops, taking 85 to 90 percent of the crop off the trees, Kober said. Humans could pick the rest.
Abundant Robotics is working on a picker that uses suction to vacuum apples off trees.

I was now fascinated with this suction technology to vacuum apples.  This from IEEE--back in college, I was a student member of this professional organization of electrical and electronic engineers!--offers some interesting observations:

Besides the sheer entertainment value, the vacuum picking technique (an approach being used by other robotics groups) looks like it might be faster in operation and easier to implement than a traditional gripper. Since it only exerts pressure when its, er, orifice (?) is mostly sealed, it can pluck apples out of trees while leaves remain untouched, and as long as it gets close enough, it looks like the apples essentially pick themselves.
The tricky parts are going to be consistently “seeing” apples that may be (I would guess) almost entirely hidden behind leaves and branches, and then managing to reach those apples with a very bulky picking system. Making it reliable and cost-effective will be another challenge, although the potential market is certainly significant. Of course, all we really have to go on right now is a blurry video of a prototype that’s almost a year old and our usual wild speculation, but our guess is that we’ll be finding out more within the year.

The video of the vaccuum-technology in apple picking is without sounds.  The gripper technology is impressive enough for me.

Building that wall--even the mere rhetoric--accelerates the building of more robots, I suppose.

As I wrote in my recent op-ed::

We the people need to try to understand such complexities in a rapidly evolving global economic geography. And, more importantly, we will need political leaders who can articulate constructive policy responses

Even the "invisible hand" does not want to pick beans!

Over the summer, when visiting with a student at a fruit farm, I got to taste cherries that were heavenly.  Trees with pears that were a few weeks away from ripening and harvesting made even me, who does not care much for pears, drool.

The student explained how harvesting pears is not an easy job.  Now, do not think that he is puny like I am.  Nope. He is one hell of a well-built fellow.  But, apparently harvesting pears tires him out more than any other farm work.  Of course, his work at the farm is not to pick fruits.  The harvesting is done by a crew of migrant farm labor.  And, yes, the migrant labor is mostly Mexican.

A few months after that summer, the country elected to the White House a demagogue who has vowed to build a "big beautiful wall"; to deport eleven million undocumented immigrants; and to even block remittances to Mexico.

As Newton made us understand, every action has its reactions.  Like this:

[California's farming industry is] calling on congressional representatives to educate the incoming president on the workforce it takes to feed the country, and they’re assuring workers they’ll protect them.

Good luck with educating the demagogue!

Trump’s remarks were felt sharply in California, which produces nearly half the country’s fruits, vegetables and nuts valued at $47 billion annually. Experts say his words resonate nationwide.
Texas, Florida and Georgia are examples of states with large migrant communities dominating home construction, health care, food service industries, said David Zonderman, a labor historian at North Carolina State University.
“California might be ground zero,” he said of immigrant families living in the shadows. “But it’s not a unique California issue.” 

And why is this important?

Roughly 325,000 workers in California do the back-breaking jobs that farmers say nobody else will do, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Manuel Cunha Jr., president of the Nisei Farmers League farming association, estimates 85 percent of California farmworkers live in the United States illegally.
Farmers for years have scrambled under a shrinking labor pool.
Mexico’s improving economy has slowed the flow of migrant workers.

Meanwhile, the demagogue's promise that Mexico will pay for that big beautiful wall is having another kind of a reaction.

A campaign memo released in April 2016 says the Trump administration will force Mexico to stump up by threatening to block money transfers from undocumented Mexicans living in the United States. This would be “an easy decision for Mexico” according to the memo. Indeed, Mexico received nearly $25bn in remittances in 2015 according to its central bank, equivalent to 2.3% of the country’s GDP. Over 98% of these remittance payments came from the United States.

So, if you are one of those remitters and you don't want to take any chances with a demagogue, then what would do?  You will send as much as you can right away. Yes?

 In November remittances to Mexico totalled nearly $2.4bn, a 25% jump over the previous year. Total remittances for 2016 are expected to reach $27bn, $2bn more than in 2015. And America’s southern neighbours may be pre-empting the Mr Trump administration in other ways. 

Oh well; if we cannot eat fruits and nuts and vegetables anymore, then we can always feast on beef and pork. Oh, wait, that too has immigrant labor--from Somalia.  Didn't the demagogue claim that all Somalis are terrorists?

May we please work on a new social contract?

In the old, old days, I would wander in the library and read whatever interested me.  The key word is "interested"--because there were plenty of occasions when I was interested in what I read but had no idea what the author was writing about.  It is like watching an avant garde movie, La Sapienza for instance, and then later reading up to understand the subtext.

These days, I don't aimlessly walk around in libraries.  I browse from home.  Saves me a whole lot of walking, but my fingers ache! ;)

It is through browsing that I came across this interview in the Harvard Business Review.  I got excited because it features everything that I talk and write about: Globalization, labor, robots, footloose corporations, welfare safety net, gig economy, college education, ... Aren't you, too, impressed with what the interview covers?

HBR's editor interviews some guy who was the head of some firm that I had never heard about.  Let's be honest here; I can't know it all! ;)  The guy is Jeffrey Joerres who apparently " led ManpowerGroup for 15 years before stepping down in 2015."  I had to check with Wikipedia (more achy fingers) to find out how big a firm that is.

I want to focus on a couple of observations that Joerres offers in that interview:

Companies are doing more “micro footprinting,” and that takes a nomadic mentality: You’re ready to pick up and move when required. Large footprinting, on the other hand, means you’re committed to a community for better or worse. More and more, companies will need to take a dual approach, establishing large locations and more-temporary, smaller operations at the same time.

Did you also catch that sentence? "Large footprinting, on the other hand, means you’re committed to a community for better or worse."  In the old days, companies were committed to the communities that were their home.  GM in Flint, Michigan, was that classic model.  But, those days ended almost all of a sudden.  Gone.  Which means that local governments and people can/should never, never, never, assume that a corporation will come to stay for the long haul.

Elsewhere, Joerres says:

In many ways, what we have now in the U.S. is similar to the early 19th century, when the Luddites first worried that machines were going to steal their jobs. We must deal with the reality that when full-scale robotics and AI arrive in a broad-based, affordable, easily justifiable way, we’ll see enormous waves of workers put out of work and ill prepared to take on very different jobs. This is going to create challenges that our institutions are not ready for.

It is one thing for a semi-baked nutcase like me to keep saying that.  As my old grad school professor made sure we understood, it is not what you say but who you are when you say that.  In this case, plenty will/should listen to what Joerres says.

We are not ready for the changes that are coming.  Not only are we far from ready, the existing system is terribly broken:

Our institutions are inadequate. Look at unemployment compensation, welfare, Social Security—these were all put in place in the middle of the past century. And they were based on certain assumptions: that when you lost your job, you would go through a process and on the other side find a job that you’d then have for a long time. Today that’s not going to happen. Look at the gig economy, look at parsed work—all these models just allow us to move faster. My dad had a second job. He went to a gas station after he got home from his first job, and he ate his dinner in between. Well, second jobs look different now. Uber is a second job. So what do you do when someone is collecting unemployment and takes a job with Uber to moonlight while he’s in training for a new full-time job? Should he lose food stamps or health care because he’s earning a little extra money to get by? Our systems look broken because they’re trying to fit things into the way the labor markets worked in the past.

Ahem, how long have I been saying this by yelling all the time about the need for an updated social contract?

Ok, are universities the panacea?

The same goes for broad-access universities. They’re built on the old labor models. They’re not turning out graduates with the skills companies need. So we have to refashion these institutions that are so important to our society.

In case you are wondering what a "broad-access university" is, well, those are the overwhelming majority that are not the elite research universities and liberal arts colleges.  The "broad-access university" description includes the university where I teach.  Again, in how many different op-eds and blog-posts have I been complaining about the old-fashioned higher education structure?

I love a solution that Joerres offers:

I think we need an iterative model. Why does it have to be all in or all out? Why can’t someone be on partial welfare? Or on partial unemployment compensation? If a worker loses her job that paid $50,000 a year but can only find a new job for $40,000, her unemployment compensation goes away, but she has lost $10,000. Why don’t we make up the difference for her for another six months because she had what it took to go out and find a job? Some people might see that as a giveaway. It’s not. It’s a small price to pay to encourage that worker to get back into the market. I’d rather pay someone to be in the market than out of the market.

Exactly!  If only we could talk about such important issues, instead of the wasted time and energy on crap!

How rooted are you in this footloose world?

Switching over from electrical engineering to graduate school in an alien field meant that every single day I was encountering ideas and arguments that I had never ever come across in my life in India.  I suppose to some, this is the worst approach because the more one keeps going after new ideas, the less one specializes.  Well, unless one is talented and able like this person, for instance, and I ain't! ;)

"Footloose" was one of those new ideas that made an impression on me.  No, not that footloose. All these years later, it turns out that neither Donald Trump nor Bernie Sanders has had that concept explained to them!  If they looked it up on Wiki, they would have understood this about footloose industries: "an industry that can be placed and located at any location without effect from factors such as resources or transport."

Note the key idea there--located anywhere.

That "anywhere" was China, for most manufactured goods.  Honest academics have known about this footloose nature for a long time.  But, we academics are mere buzzkills and we have no idea how to energize people like how demagogues can.  One of these days I should assume the name of Major Buzzkill, which describes me really well ;)

So, we now have a strange spectacle of Trumpeters from the right and Berniacs from the left yelling and screaming about China.  Meanwhile, China is also beginning to understand footloose:

In today’s China, however, workers face a more troubled outlook than Mr. Trump suggests. They are losing their jobs because of a slowing domestic economy, rising costs and stiffer foreign competition — including from the United States.
Presidential candidates “are screaming about yesterday’s problems,” said Jim McGregor, chairman of the consulting firm APCO Worldwide’s Greater China operations. “Manufacturing for export is getting harder and harder” in China.

Yep, they “are screaming about yesterday’s problems.”  But, you think you can explain these things to Trump and his maniacal supporters?

 Labor costs in China are now significantly higher than in many other emerging economies. Factory workers in Vietnam earn less than half the salary of a Chinese worker, while those in Bangladesh get paid under a quarter as much.

Gooooooooood Morning, Vietnam!  Or, even India, like in this case:

Taiwan’s Foxconn, best known for making Apple iPhones in Chinese factories, is planning to build as many as 12 new assembly plants in India, creating around one million new jobs there. A pilot operation in the western Indian state of Maharashtra will start churning out mobile phones later this year.

Now, it does not mean that the industry will always move only to lower labor cost countries.  My favorite way to explain this to students is this: If it were truly about the cost of labor alone, then every manufacturer would be based in countries like Ethiopia or Tanzania.  But then students, too, do not listen to me.  I write op-eds about the footloose economy and, well, nobody cares.  Story of my life! ;)

Anyway, back to China:

Rising costs have also significantly altered China’s competitive position compared with the United States.
In a 2015 study, the Boston Consulting Group said the costs of manufacturing in China’s major export-producing zone were now almost the same as in the United States, after taking into account wages, worker productivity, energy costs and other factors.

Oh, but don't jump up and celebrate thinking that this will bring in a gazillion jobs to the US.  Most manufacturing is and will be highly automated--machines can be awesomely cheap workers, if the technology is there.

BTW, you can now see why economic geography is such a fascinating intellectual field.  The intersection of economics and geography when viewed through how it affects the human condition, and what the policy implications can be is not only brain fodder but with immense real world implications.  If only our "leaders" had taken an introductory course in economic geography!    

Just-in-time means ... labor is even more screwed!

A younger colleague posted this on Twitter:

what is an #intellectual?
— Gregory Zobel (@drgbz) April 20, 2015

My reply to him on Twitter was from this blog-post back in June 2013, in which I had quoted William Deresiewicz (whom I had planned to invite to talk on campus, but the managers did not green-light my suggestion!):

An intellectual is not an expert, and a public intellectual is not an expert who condescends to speak to a wider audience about her area of expertise. An intellectual is a generalist, an autodidact, a thinker who wanders and speculates. As Jack Miles puts it in a stellar essay on the question, “It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic. It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual.”

Whether I am an intellectual or not, undisciplined preparation has very much been the story of my life.  A lack of discipline means that I read, watch, and listen to, seemingly unconnected topics.  But, those fragments help me understand the world.

One fragment today came from Robert Reich.  Yes, the "New Democrat" Reich, who served in Bill Clinton's cabinet.  And, this post of Reich's will appeal even to the pro-business blogger, who is the consistent (and almost always the lone) commenter here.  After all, my friend Ramesh has recently blogged agreeing with the commie Labor Party leader, Ed Miliband, and even loudly criticized Walmart as "a sad commentary on the business world."

Reich writes:

Just-in-time scheduling like this is the latest new thing, designed to make retail outlets, restaurants, hotels, and other customer-driven businesses more nimble and keep costs to a minimum.
Software can now predict up-to-the-minute staffing needs on the basis of  information such as traffic patterns, weather, and sales merely hours or possibly minutes before.
This way, employers don’t need to pay anyone to be at work unless they’re really needed. Companies can avoid paying wages to workers who’d otherwise just sit around.
Employers assign workers tentative shifts, and then notify them a half-hour or ten minutes before the shift is scheduled to begin whether they’re actually needed. Some even require workers to check in by phone, email, or text shortly before the shift starts.

Welcome to the app-economy!

So, when Ramesh blogged about agreeing with Miliband, I had merely read and blogged about the possibilities but didn't know that it was already a serious real policy/political problem in the UK.  A few days after that, Slate reported on the same issue, that New York's attorney general:

 is concerned that “a number of companies in New York State utilize on-call shifts and require employees to report in some manner ... to learn whether their services are ultimately needed on-site that day.”

Back in the days of manufacturing, just-in-time manufacturing was a big deal.  From Toyota and from Japan it quickly spread everywhere.  Now, that just-in-time concept is being extended to the service industry, where the "inventory" is labor; the reserve army of labor, as Marx phrased it.

Reich notes:

employees are now becoming variable costs of doing business – depending on ups and downs in demand that may change hour by hour, possibly minute by minute.
Yet working people have to pay the rent or make mortgage payments, and have keep up with utility, food, and fuel bills. These bills don’t vary much from month to month. They’re the fixed costs of living.
American workers can’t simultaneously be variable costs for business yet live in their own fixed-cost worlds.
They’re also husbands and wives and partners, most are parents, and they often have to take care of elderly relatives. All this requires coordinating schedules in advance – who’s going to cover for whom, and when.
But such planning is impossible when you don’t know when you’ll be needed at work. 

Yep, it is the share-the-scraps economy!

Which then leads to the question that I have been wrestling with since the commie days of my youth.  Marx said "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."  What good is my intellectual understanding (assuming it is intellectual) when I can't do a damn thing?

I am increasingly worried about the on-demand economy

Back in the elevator in the 37-story tower, the messengers do talk, one tells me. They end up asking each other which apps they work for: Postmates. Seamless. EAT24. GrubHub. Safeway.com.

Welcome to the on-demand, app, world.  If this is the future, then I don't want any part of it.  Because, as the writer notes:

And that’s when I realized: the on-demand world isn’t about sharing at all. It’s about being served. This is an economy of shut-ins.

Shut-ins.  

There is something strange happening.  Back when I started teaching in California, which seems like eons ago, the business school faculty were getting all excited to offer courses with "e-commerce" somewhere in the title.  It seemed all novel at that time, when Netscape was the dominant web browser!  We were all toying with phrases like "click and order" will wipe out "brick and mortar."  Alan Greenspan thought it was all irrational exuberance; remember that?

All that was before the iPhone revolution. Before Android. Before "apps" that work on smartphones.  Now, there seems to be a new app every day that people are gushing about.  I read the other day that messages via WhatsApp and other apps, plus the good old SMS, means that the phone, apparently, is not for calling people anymore!

In total, Americans spend about 26 minutes a day texting. That compares to spending about six minutes a day on voice calls.

 What the heck are we texting about?  It could be even for things like this:

A woman hauling two Whole Foods sacks reads the concierge an apartment number off her smartphone, along with the resident’s directions: “Please deliver to my door.”

That woman is a worker bee in this on-demand economy.  Yes, this is not the first time I blogged my concerns about this trend.  

Last year the venture capital firm SherpaVentures — whose offices are just down the street from that apartment building full of Ubers and Squares and Twitters— released a sunny study on the future of our on-demand world. They have a stake in making it go big , of course: they’re seed investors in Shyp and Munchery and have $154 million to invest in on-demand businesses. As the desire for more instant, app-based services expands up the economic chain, the report argued, entrepreneurial freelancers — everyone from grocery deliverers to cleaners to accountants to lawyers — will have flexibility to monetize their time when they want to and pursue their passions. Brick-and-mortar stores die out, and so do their low-wage retail jobs, which it suggested would personalize the world, away from the sterile anonymity of big-box stores to a “21st-century village economy,” in which we’re “united” by cellphones.
So who are we uniting with in this scenario? 

Meanwhile, in the crowded less developed economies:

grocery delivery has taken off massively in hyper-dense developing countries, where huge income disparities allow upper-middle-class citizens to turn the rest of the workforce into their personal delivery network.

The WSJ has a story about India on that point:

One morning, Ashok Kumar hoisted a huge, 110-pound pack jammed with books, cellphones, bluejeans and other items onto his back and cinched the shoulder straps.
Then he donned a helmet, climbed onto a motorcycle and, balancing precariously, headed out into the traffic-clogged streets of the Indian capital for his daily rounds.
Mr. Kumar and thousands of men like him fan out across the crowded cities of the world’s second-most-populous nation every day—foot soldiers on the front lines of India’s e-commerce revolution.
This low-tech army of urban sherpas hauls bags of online purchases down narrow alleys and up flights of stairs, lugging everything from laser printers and kitchen appliances to cans of Coca-Cola for their country’s burgeoning consumer class.

So, what exactly is my worry here?

In the new world of on-demand everything, you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a 21st century servant.

We aren't thinking this through.  It certainly has the feel of "share-the-scraps economy."

What if you knew how your t-shirt is made? By Sumangali Girls?

Another take on "there comes a point when you don't want to know."

I often tell students that one of the wonderful aspects of the market is that it will deliver as long as we are ready to pay up.  I remind them that in a liberal democracy, we not only get to exercise preferences in the political arena but also via the market transactions that we engage in.  It is the aggregation of such preferences that then feed into shaping not only how we humans live but also how we interact with the natural environment.

Most of us tend to think that we can be active only via the political process--by voting for a party or a candidate, or by organizing community action, or any of the possible political approaches.  But, we can equally, and perhaps more forcefully, cast our preferences via the market too.  Well, a variation of that old expression "put your money where your mouth is" can do wonders via the market, as opposed to the relatively no cost approach of signing on to petitions, for instance, to Free Tibet!

While I don't quite agree with the entire philosophy presented by Anna Lappe, the idea that I get across to students is no different from the succinct way she has put it:

Source

When we spend money to buy the atrociously inexpensive widget that is made in China, well, we are also voting for the labor and environmental conditions there.  On the other hand, if we truly valued the labor and environmental conditions, then we could bypass those widgets, or offer to pay more for products that were manufactured while treating the labor and the natural environment a lot more responsibly to our liking.  Like how I pay more for the coffee that I buy--the premium goes towards better labor conditions and a more environmentally responsible coffee-growing.

The market will deliver if we exercised such preferences to create the kind of world that we want.  It is just that more often than not we don't put our money where our mouth is.  Talk is bloody cheap, right?

And, what if we dug deeper into how those widgets are made in some corner of the world?

Dana Liebelson writes in Mother Jones about trying to see where t-shirts are made.  Of course, the publication being Mother Jones is an immediate give-away on what to expect in the piece.  Yet, it is a must read.

Leibelson goes to my old country, India.  To my old part of the world there, Tamil Nadu.  And she goes to Coimbatore, which was another old stomping ground of mine.

The details that she writes about are troubling, indeed.  Will make most of us squirm in our seats and wish that we didn't know anything about all those.  Life is easier when we don't know.  Denial is a marvelous mechanism to have a blissful life.  But, attempting to understand the world means getting to know the atrocities all around that, ironically, seem to make our daily lives that much more comfortable.

So, how much at ease is Liebelson when she returns to the comforts of life in the US after finding out how the t-shirt is made?

A few months after I return from India, I go out to drinks with some friends, one of whom is wearing a rad pair of black tights with stripes up the sides. When I ask her where they came from, she proudly tells me that they cost just $20 at H&M. I don't push for details, because who am I to judge? I'm wearing a made-in-India Urban Outfitters shirt I bought before my trip. I looked at the label when I returned home, for the very first time. This is a thing I do now, even though it won't tell me what I want to know: Somewhere down the supply chain, did Aruna or Selvi make parts of my shirt?

Who am I to judge is a variation of "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone," right?

Liebelson concludes that essay recalling her meeting with, and interviewing, Lakshmi.  I wish Liebelson had pointed out the tragic irony of the name: Lakshmi is the name of the Hindu goddess of wealth, and here was a real life Lakshmi struggling for her very existence.

At 25, she was a year older than me, all of 4-foot-10, and wearing a beautiful orange dress covered with flowers that she had embroidered herself. Beginning at age 16, she worked at a spinning mill for five years, in conditions she called "torture." Supervisors offered her vacations in return for sex, and when she declined, she says they denied her lunch breaks. She was dyeing yarn with chemicals that burned her hands and gave her boils. Supervisors would only give girls gloves occasionally, deducting the cost from their pay. Her hands would go numb for days. After five years, she left with about $620—half of one month's rent on my studio apartment—and crippling ulcers. She has since spent her wages on doctors' bills, and there is nothing left for a dowry.

Caption at the New Yorker:
Lakshmi, 25, developed burns and boils on her hands from dyeing chemicals. "No man is going to marry me now," she says.

Lakshmi is trapped in circumstances that are beyond are her control.

I interviewed her in her room, which was filled with embroidered blankets. It was night, and the stars were as numerous as they are in the big sky of Montana, where I grew up. Through the open windows we could hear a chorus of insects. We took a photograph together, sitting on her cot, and she put her arm around me and grinned. A calico cat jumped from the dirt floor onto the bed. For that second, we were just two young women—unmarried, drinking tea, tired from a long day. But after we stood up, I knew that I would soon get on a plane to Washington, DC, where stores selling cheap leopard-print pumps and skinny jeans line the streets and no one expects me to give my entire salary to my parents for a dowry. And Lakshmi would still be here in this room, knowing—as she told me right after the photo was taken—that "no man is going to marry me now."

Perhaps another case of "there comes a point when you don't want to know."

The Bangladesh clothing factory disaster and us. Not the US, but us

We consumers want to pay the lowest price possible for whatever we want to buy.  The market works, and works furiously, to get us products at those low prices.

This drive for low prices has led to China's rise as the world's factory.  In an earlier post, I wondered whether China's "cheap" manufacturing is worth all that.  I noted there:

We consumers all over the world are not willing to pay anything towards maintaining the environment, leave alone improving its quality.  Simultaneously, we seem to be addicted to inexpensive goods that come from China.  Even from a simple economic understanding, we can hypothesize that somebody is paying a price that we are not.

In China's case, there is one huge price that we already paying the piper: the effect on the natural environment.  Smoke and smog, and erosion, and more.

China's economic growth and development means that slowly wages have risen there, which then has spread the "cheap" manufacturing elsewhere, to poorer countries like Bangladesh.  Unlike China's environmental cost that we don't pay for because it is largely out of our sight, the drive towards lower and lower prices is a lot more visible in Bangladesh.  The latest was the collapse of the multi-level factory that has resulted in a body count that has already exceeded 550!

As consumers, we might be able to ignore the impacts on China's environment, but the loss of human lives in Bangladesh makes us pause, at least for a while, forcing us to re-evaluate our drive towards low prices.  What is the cost breakdown of the typical t-shirt manufactured in one of those factories?

Twelve cents!

To get prices that low, workers see just 12 cents a shirt, or two per cent of the wholesale cost. That’s one of the lowest rates in the world—about half of what a worker in a Chinese factory might make

But, those twelve cents are also why these jobs exist in Bangladesh.  This low wage is:

a major reason for the explosion of Bangladesh’s garment industry, worth $19 billion last year, up from $380 million in 1985. The country’s 5,400 factories employ four million people, mostly women, who cut and stitch shirts and pants that make up 80 per cent of the country’s total exports.

We forget that Bangladesh is one awfully poor country.  Matt Yglesias writes while situating "Bangladesh's GDP per capita in the context of American history":

It's common to compare Bangladesh to America's own sweatshop era in the late-19th century, but Krugman shows that Bangladesh is actually much poorer than that.

Yes, Bangladesh can do a lot more than it currently does to enforce labor regulations and occupational safety protocols.  But, ultimately,

Real reform will mean paying a lot more than $14 for a shirt.

We consumers have the power to influence favorable working conditions and lives for Bangladeshi workers, or workers anywhere, for that matter.  But, we have to be ready to put our money where our mouth is:

Babul Akhter, president of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation, said buyers have a responsibility to check the safety and security of those making the clothes they order, but most overlook this.
Abdus Salam Murshedy, former president of Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, adds: "The buyers and brands look for the most competitive offer. We cannot pay appropriate wages [to workers] unless we get proper prices for the orders."

It is easy to criticize "those greedy corporations" when they are merely responding to us greedy consumers!

As I noted in another post, it is bizarre that human life in some parts of the planet is held more valuable than human life elsewhere:

I find it terrible that a human life is not the same anywhere on the planet.  There seems to be a collective ennui when it comes to the loss of the lives of humans who were doing nothing but tending to their daily lives in some parts of the world.  The innocent civilians who die by the hundreds and thousands in many, many countries of the world do not make it even to the back pages of the papers, leave alone the front pages.

This Bangladesh incident will slowly move away from the front pages to some obscure spots, and will eventually disappear.  Soon it will be the holiday shopping season and we consumers will line up outside the locked stores for the early bird prices.  We will trample fellow-humans as we rush to pick up that remarkably low-priced product from China or Bangladesh.

The customer is always right!


New Portable Sewing Machine Lets Sweatshop Employees Work On The Go

The capitalist behavior of unions :)

Outsourced entirely to Megan McArdle:

So bigger fleas have little fleas

Upon their backs to bite 'em

And little fleas have lesser fleas

And so, ad infinitum

A fascinating study in modern industrial organization:

If you want a good measure of how deeply the collective bargaining bill in Wisconsin has disrupted public sector unions, there is no better example than the Wisconsins Education Association Council (WEAC).

Last month WEAC announced that it was laying off 40% of its staff. With little over which to collectively bargain, and with dues no longer withheld from paychecks, the need for and sustainability of a union bureaucracy could not be justified.

Now WEAC is being boycotted by National Staff Organization (NSO), a union representing educational union employees.

It's like the fellow I once met who was a consultant, helping other people to set up consultancies.  Or the bankers who specialize in holding money for other bankers.  We're a specialist society.

The union stuff reminds me of the wonderful satire by Aasif Mandvi :)

The Daily Show
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What is wrong with this editorial cartoon on baby boomers and unemployment?

The cartoon, on the right, suggests that the Gen X-ers are doomed because the baby boomers not retiring early enough.

What is the fallacy in this argument? 

Click here to find out

Quote of the day

Whether here within the university, at think tanks, in the government, in the press, or even working with us in the labor movement, working people need the help of engaged policy intellectuals if we are together going to build an economy that works for all.
Think about the great promise of America and the great legacy we have inherited. Our wealth as a nation and our energy as a people can deliver, in the words of my predecessor Samuel Gompers, “more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.” ...
Working people are angry—and we are right to be angry at the betrayal of our economic future. Help us turn that anger into the energy to win a better country and a better world.

From Richard Trumka's (President of AFL-CIO) speech on “Why Working People Are Angry and Why Politicians Should Listen” delivered at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
ht

More on the college hype

To a casual reader, and perhaps to any colleague who might wander into this blog, it might be quite a surprise to read my posts on how all over the world we are hyping up the college degree--and this criticism coming from an academic whose job security depends on the hype! When two graduating students asked me to recommend a book for them to read in the transition to their next phase, I suggested Shop Class as Soulcraft.

In a review of this book in the Chronicle, the reviewer writes:

Skilled manual labor is far more cognitive than people realize, Crawford argues, and deserves more respect. That is especially true during tough economic times, when an independent tradesperson can make a decent and dignified living, and — this is important — can't be outsourced. (You can't get your car fixed in China.) "The question of what a good job looks like — of what sort of work is both secure and worthy of being honored — is more open now than it has been for a long time," he writes.

Crawford believes that Americans, in their frenzy to send every kid to college in pursuit of information-age job skills, have lost something valuable. "My sense is that some kids are getting hustled off to college when they'd rather be learning to build things or fix things, and that includes kids who are very smart," he says in an interview.

Crawford's phone has been ringing, and the blogosphere abuzz with lively discussions about working with one's hands, since an excerpt of Shop Class ran in The New York Times Magazine last month.

The future of manufacturing, and American workers

Robert Reich has a fantastic piece on why we ought not to be insanely worried about the loss of manufacturing. Read the entire argument here. An excerpt:

Want to blame something? Blame new knowledge. Knowledge created the electronic gadgets and software that can now do almost any routine task. This goes well beyond the factory floor. America also used to have lots of elevator operators, telephone operators, bank tellers and service-station attendants. Remember? Most have been replaced by technology. Supermarket check-out clerks are being replaced by automatic scanners. The Internet has taken over the routine tasks of travel agents, real estate brokers, stock brokers and even accountants. With digitization and high-speed data networks a lot of back office work can now be done more cheaply abroad.

Any job that's even slightly routine is disappearing from the U.S. But this doesn't mean we are left with fewer jobs. It means only that we have fewer routine jobs, including traditional manufacturing. When the U.S. economy gets back on track, many routine jobs won't be returning--but new jobs will take their place. A quarter of all Americans now work in jobs that weren't listed in the Census Bureau's occupation codes in 1967. Technophobes, neo-Luddites and anti-globalists be warned: You're on the wrong side of history. You see only the loss of old jobs. You're overlooking all the new ones.

The reason they're so easy to overlook is that so much of the new value added is invisible. A growing percent of every consumer dollar goes to people who analyze, manipulate, innovate and create. These people are responsible for research and development, design and engineering. Or for high-level sales, marketing and advertising. They're composers, writers and producers. They're lawyers, journalists, doctors and management consultants. I call this "symbolic analytic" work because most of it has to do with analyzing, manipulating and communicating through numbers, shapes, words, ideas.

Sweatshop labor in Bangladesh

Yet another fantastic report from the Onion


New Portable Sewing Machine Lets Sweatshop Employees Work On The Go