YSU Speaker: Global economy hurts poor

The Boeing 777's modules are manufactured in 12 countries.
THE VINDICATOR
By JoANNE VIVIANO
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- She's a young, educated woman from southern Asia. Sitting behind a computer screen, she wears the headphones of a telemarketer.
Her job: to take calls for the New Jersey welfare office.
Her location: Bombay, India.
She speaks English with a touch of a Southern drawl and is paid about $200 per month. In New Jersey, a worker doing the same job would make at least $200 per week.
She represents the new face of globalization that joins the more familiar images of women in garment industry sweatshops in Mexico.
But even the sweatshops have changed. They've moved south into Mexico's Yucatan, where Mayan communities are poor and labor is cheap. The factories in northern areas closed down when the economy improved and workers became more expensive.
The women still make denim for American labels such as Eddie Bauer, Gap and Banana Republic. But the plant is owned by a Hong Kong firm.
The images of these working women -- and their stories -- were presented Thursday at the "Working Class Studies: Intersections with Race, Gender and Sexuality" conference at Youngstown State University.
They were offered by Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity in America at Brown University, as she discussed globalization from race, gender and class perspectives.
Sees more inequality
"Increased trade spurred by decreased regulation and removal of all barriers does not produce better jobs," Hu-DeHart said. ".... Globalization ... exacerbates and increases inequality, both between nations and within communities."
It creates larger gaps between rich and poor, white and minority -- the world's 200 richest people have more wealth than 41 percent of the entire world, Hu-DeHart said. Once termed a "tide to lift all boats," she said, it has become a tide to "lift all yachts."
A plant in Mexico was already serving as a prototype for "export processing zones" when the North American Free Trade Agreement was implemented in January 1994, Hu-DeHart said. They have since proliferated all over the world -- in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Factories are built overnight with few health and safety standards and can be relocated in the blink of an eye.
As an example of the global market, Hu-DeHart pointed to Nike. Shoes are designed in Portland, Ore., with help from designers in South Korea and Indonesia. A shoe's 52 separate parts are assembled in five countries, usually by young women hunched over machines, small tools and toxic glue.
Keeping costs low
Labor strategy is to minimize cost and maximize flexibility. Subcontractors are used; these middlemen must give the lowest bid to get the job and cut labor costs to the minimum -- often paying workers less than a living wage, Hu-DeHart continued. If workers attempt to organize, the plant disappears.
The logic is the same across the spectrum of manufacturing right up to the Boeing 777, Hu-DeHart said. The jetliner's modules are manufactured in 12 countries before being assembled in Everett, Wash.
When products can't be exported, foreign workers are imported -- to meat packing facilities and sweatshops in the United States, often located next to Chinatown areas in cities such as New York and Los Angeles. Workers can be enslaved or intimidated by immigration status.
Hu-DeHart pointed out that the anti-globalization movement is not anti-sweatshop. Activists do want regulations and limitations that end abuses against workers worldwide.
The state of globalization was not inevitable, but the consequence of public policy choice that can be changed, she said.
"How can we stop globalization or its abuses?" Hu-DeHart asked. "With an international class-based movement against globalization, starting with the international organization of workers."
The Conference of Working-Class Studies runs through Saturday. For details, call (330) 941-2978 or visit www.as.ysu.edu/~cwcs/.