Thomas Friedman by The World is Flat

Author:The World is Flat
Language: eng
Format: epub

An essay in the McKinsey Quarterly, “Beyond Cheap Labor: Lessons for Developing Economies” (January 2005), offers a nice example of this: “In northern Italy's textile and apparel industry... the majority of garment production has moved to lower-cost locations, but employment remains stable because companies have put more resources into tasks such as designing clothes and coordinating global production networks.”

It is so easy to demonize free markets-and the freedom to outsource and offshore-because it is so much easier to see people being laid off than being hired. But occasionally a newspaper tries to dig deep into the issue. My hometown paper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, did just that. It looked at exactly how the Minnesota economy was being affected by the flattening of the world, actually daring to run an article on September 5, 2004, headlined, “Offshore Jobs Bring Gains at Home.” The article, date-lined Wuxi, China, began like this: “Outside the air is dank, dusty and hot as tropical fever. Inside, in an environment that's dry, spotless and cool, hundreds of former farm laborers covered head to toe in suits looking like something out of NASA are performing work for Bloomington-based Donaldson Co. Inc.... In Donaldson's case, the company has twice as many workers in China-2,500-as the 1,100 it has in Bloomington. The Chinese operation not only has allowed Donaldson to keep making a product it no longer could make at a profit in the United States, it also has helped boost the company's Minnesota employment, up by 400 people since 1990. Donaldson's highly paid engineers, chemists and designers in Minnesota spend their days designing updated filters that the Chinese plant will make for use in computers, MP3 players and digital video recorders. The falling disk-drive prices made possible by Chinese production are feeding demand for the gadgets. 'If we didn't follow [the trend], we'd be out of business,' said David Timm, general manager of Donaldson's disk-drive and microelectronics unit. In Minnesota, Global Insight estimates that 1,854 jobs were created as a result of foreign outsourcing in 2003. By 2008, the firm expects nearly 6,700 new jobs in Minnesota as a consequence of the trend.”

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