On Tue, 6 May 1997, Laurie Dougherty wrote: > This is related to the point Tavis is making. While it's true that people tend to >use > services locally, it is not true that those services must be offered in any given > location. Look at the inner cities which are lacking in many of the retail and > service outlets that exist in wealthier areas. With deregulation of phone service, > this is more likely to happen - that phone service will, if not disappear, at least > deteriorate. The same may happen in rural areas if the subsidy of rural phone > service ends. Eventually the hardware requirements will shift. This is more a > matter of competition for capital than labor market competition, but labor markets > will be afffected by it. No disagreement here (except that in my hood there are fewer and fewer hospitals and schools, but there's a store on every corner offering beepers, cell phones, phone cards, and cheap calls to the DR). > In Boston, because of institutions like Harvard and MIT or Massachusetts General > Hospital, higher education and health care are considered an export industry. > Under the pressure of managed care the big hospitals are consolidating. At the > same time, smaller hospitals all over the state are closing. Many kinds of > business services are internationalized. There may be different dynamics > operating in service industries, but they still exist within a globally integrating > economy. This is true. But it's not the same kind of export competition. Harvard, MIT, and Mass general don't argue to their workers that they have to lower wages to compete with Berkeley or Oxford. None of these places are threatening to close down and move their work to Mexico. Although people come from all over the world to go to Boston hospitals, most patients are still from New England, and nobody's out pitching the cheapest services to customers in Australia. Competition is in the form of quality and innovation, and that matters a lot for worker bargaining power. As for business services, well, I worked as a temp in Boston for several years, and most of those jobs were in FIRE firms. Almost all of the client base of these offices was in New England if not in Eastern Mass. So again, although the companies were often international, the markets were usually local or at most regional. Cheers, Tavis
