Corporations: Bringing the Third World to You!

Posted on July 23, 2003

There’s been lots of noise lately about IBM’s recent announcement that it was moving white-collar jobs overseas, primarily to India. The always-provocative Philip Greenspun has an interesting take on it: how corporations, besides just moving American jobs to the Third World, have succeeded in many ways in importing the values of the Third World to America:

An American has a First Amendment right to free speech. A corporate slave, however, generally forfeits his right to write about things that happen in his workplace as a condition of his employment and as a condition of receiving serverance pay after he is fired. Because the typical corporate slave spends 60 hours per week commuting and working effectively this means that he has no right to write about anything that happens to him for most of his waking hours. If the slave wants to get promoted he probably is wisest not writing or saying anything too controversial even if it does not regard work…

America as traditionally conceived is a place of middle class opportunity and reasonably equal wealth distribution, unlike Third World countries in which a ruling elite collects all of the cookies. A corporate slave will take home, on average, 1/500th the pay of his top managers.

Something to think about in these troubled times…