[I wear the title proudly. :) ] On Wed, 7 May 1997, D Shniad wrote: > Tavis: > > My contention is that service markets aren't as globalizable as > manufacturing markets. > > Sid: > > I don't think this is anything more than a contention. Allright, I'll use some data. It comes from a data set I'm working on that studies employers in four different areas (New York, Kalamazoo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh). Admittedly it might be a non-random sample geographically, but it's what I have handy. The question is "What is the main market for your firm's goods or services?" and the answers (weighted by firm size and to correct for industry oversampling) are: The Neighborhood 40.2% Metropolitan Area 42.1 National 10.1 International 7.6 [N=316] For those in the service sector (SIC1=9), the answers are: The Neighborhood 34.9% Metropolitan Area 54.7 National 8.5 International 1.9 [N=106] I don't have a big enough sample in manufacturing and telecommunications to get consistent results. :( There must be some big national marketing survey somewhere that has a similar question, though.... > Tavis: > > The same types of jobs you describe in telecommunications (operator > services) have their analogues in many other sectors: Claims processing > in health care, credit card and loan processing in banking, catalog sales > in retail trade. They can all be moved anywhere around the country > (though I suspect that language difficulties at least would make it hard > to move them across borders). > > Sid: > > The work doesn't necessarily involve speaking. If it does, English is spoken > by folks across Canada, the U.S. and Britain, as well as by a great many > educated folk around the world; Spanish is spoken in Europe, Mexico and > South America, as well as across the U.S., etc. C'mon, that's stretching it. Would you trust non-Latino American clerical workers to process forms in Spanish? > But the key thing is that a great of this work is computer-based and doesn't > involve speaking at all. The maquila-based postal sorting (by Spanish- > speaking workers sorting mail that's located in Chicago) is prototypical of > what I'm describing. By the same token, remote trouble analysis of the > phone system can be done in the same locale as where the trouble is or > across the world. > > It's not just low end jobs that we're talking about, either. The Indian > software industry is state-of-the-art in sophistication, but it pays wages that > are a fraction of those paid software writers in Europe and North America. This just sounds like a column out of _Wired_ magazine. I could continue it and write up all these wonderful examples of the neat brain jobs that are being created by computerization and all of the menial jobs that they're replacing and how production is obsolete and the new economy is information based. But gee whiz stories are just that. > This is what makes Robert Reich's promotion of education, training and > skills such a meaningless response to capital's restructuring of work; capital > doesn't have to choose between high skills and high wages on the one hand > and low skills and low wages on the other. It can have *both*. Yes, yes, yes, but what does that have to do with globalization? The same is true of the City University of New York replacing all its faculty with low-paid gradutate students, most of whom are from the City. > Tavis: > > However most jobs in health care (nursing and assistance, hospital clerical > and mainaintance work), banking (teller and sales work), and retail trade > (person-to-person sales, service) are much harder to move very far. > > Sid: > > You're over generalizing here, Tavis. Hospital clerical work can be handled > in exactly the same manner as what I described in the phone industry. It > can easily be provided at the end of a phone line or by forcing people > signing in or out of hospital to provide their personal information via a > computer screen. Banking tellers are going the way of the dodo bird. At > least in Canada, their numbers are dropping precipitately (I doubt this is > unique to this country) as their ranks are replaced by computerized tellers > and ATMs. You're over exaggerating, Sid. When was the last time you checked into a hospital? (Me, last October when I made a boboo with a utility knife and nearly sliced my thumb off). I've temped at many clerical jobs in hospitals. They consist of doing lots of bullshit for doctors (taking dictations, making tennis dates), xeroxing things to put in files, keeping track of patient rosters; I also had a job for a few months as the data entry clerk in inventory for a big hospital in Boston (Beth Israel). I'm sure many of the tasks (requisition forms, patient logs) could be slightly automated, with due thanks from a lot of clerical workers. But most of the work is sort of informational clean-up, and depends on interaction with doctors, nurses and patients to figure out what the hell is going on. Remember also that medical files are generally kept off-line and decentralized for privacy reasons. As to the Teller, the numbers are certainly falling, though they haven't disappeared. I extracted this from the CPS -- the latest year available is 1995. It's the percent who self-identified as tellers, estimator SE in parenthesis (the SE's are similar because it's a binomial distribution): 83 .00444 (.00023) 84 .00420 (.00023) 85 .00445 (.00023) 86 .00397 (.00022) 87 .00040 (.00022) 88 .00432 (.00023) 89 .00419 (.00023) 90 .00410 (.00022) 91 .00428 (.00023) 92 .00454 (.00024) 93 .00349 (.00021) 94 .00352 (.00021) 95 .00368 (.00022) I mean ya they're down a bit but at this rate it'll take several decades for them to disappear. On the other hand, there are more than enough nurses, nurses aides and orderlies to make up for them (the latter, in NYC, icreasingly being workfare workers): 83 .03326 (.00063) 84 .03263 (.00063) 85 .03317 (.00062) 86 .03338 (.00063) 87 .03388 (.00064) 88 .03379 (.00063) 89 .03401 (.00066) 90 .03295 (.00062) 91 .03313 (.00062) 92 .03526 (.00065) 93 .03756 (.00067) 94 .03904 (.00070) 95 .03901 (.00070) > You keep pushing examples of face-to-face contact. But the point is that > this is exactly what is being targeted and reduced, replaced by the use of > computerized services. They're certainly trying. But then they've been trying for over a century to get rid of workers entirely and have factories that are just run by machines. Maybe someday they will (oh, did I tell you the one about my old roommate's friend who runs a middle eastern bread bakery in Boston? His bread is all made by computer and his only employees are delivery drivers. How about the kibbutz that makes irrigation equipment and all of the employees are computer technicians overseeing control specs on the machine tools?). But a few gee-whiz anecdotes don't mean we're there yet. Cheers, Tavis
