Tavis Barr writes: > >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 But the threat of taking some things off shore (or out of state) is very real for firms like Fidelity Investments (which is currently building branch offices in RI & NH and overseas). There's a real problem in talking about "services" as if it were a homogeneous field. Marx wrote some interesting things about services in _Theories of Surplus Value_; Andy Sayer argues, cogently IMHO, that "services" is a chaotic conception in _Method in Social Science_; and a few years ago Dick Walker had a great article deconstructing the concept along the same lines as Sayer but in much more depth (I think it's reprinted in his book jointly written with Sayer -- _The New Social Division of Labor_). We have to be very clear about (1) what we mean when we say "services" and (2) the level of abstaction we're operating at. Marsh Feldman Phone: 401/874-5953 Community Planning, 204 Rodman Hall FAX: 401/874-5511 The University of Rhode Island Internet: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Kingston, RI 02881-0815
