adopt local practices. A Los Angeles Times editorial argued that European companies, when they establish facilities in the United States, actually adopt American-style practices (such as “union-free” workplaces) that differ radically from the same companies’ practices in their home countries (Meyerson 2011).
The emergence of a global economy has undoubtedly brought with it much that is new. Workers in the United States are much more likely to encounter technologies and managerial practices that originated elsewhere, and workers in developing countries have been drawn into more direct relationships with global webs of production. Still, arguing that all this is entirely new seems an exaggeration. Employers have relocated in the past, and even the earliest industrial firms in America “borrowed” practices from the pioneering British. It seems more accurate to say that globalization has accelerated and intensified existing dynamics at work. At the same time, the socioeconomic differences between the developed and developing world have not been erased by these changes (an observation that we document in the next chapter). Nor have national differences in workplace practices been eliminated by globalization (Smith and Meiksins 1995). As with the various other changes we have reviewed, there is much of the old within the new global workplace.
Conclusion
Does the existence of new products and new ways of working verify the existence of a new economy? The answer is both yes and no. The U.S. economy has shifted away from a primary reliance on its manufacturing base, and the expanding service sector is creating new job demands, as well as opportunities. So, the economy is new in respect to the diversity of goods and services produced. But in many of the new jobs and industries, old ways of working and managing work are applied, indicating the persistence of the old economy. While some of the new jobs require different skill sets, substantial portions of the labor force work in low-skill jobs that require few skills, again indicating that not everything has changed. While organizations have redefined manager-worker relationships and are relinquishing more control to workers, some of these changes appear to be window dressing and in other circumstances have not led to a true enhancement of job quality. While the new economy offers prospects for flexible work, availability is limited and uneven. And while the global economy has shifted work opportunities, some of these changes are not so much new as they are extensions of tendencies that have been present for centuries.
We argued throughout this chapter that, while there is a new economy, it has been laid on top of and has not replaced the old economy. We also argue that the same forces that underpinned the development of the old economy continue to shape many of the contours of the new economy. The new economy offers great opportunities to liberate work, through new applications of technology, through new organizational designs, and by harnessing the contributions of a diverse workforce. But it also contains many elements of the old economy that block these opportunities and perpetuate and reproduce old ways of working. Both optimistic predictions that we are entering a new world of work and pessimistic comments about “old wine in new bottles” miss the complexity of contemporary work. Our analysis indicates that there will be both change and continuity in the emerging new economy and that there will be both positive gains for some workers and (if left unchecked) continued hardships for others.
Notes
1 The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2013, a total of 3,696,180 people were employed in computer and mathematical occupations in the United States and 11,914,590 in food preparation and serving-related occupations.
2 Economists use the terms primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary sectors. However, because they also use the phrases primary and secondary labor markets to describe divided opportunity structures, we use the terms extraction, processing, delivery, and service provision in accordance with the divisions identified by Kenessey (1987).
3 The original Luddites were generally portrayed as backward-looking opponents of technological change, and that is what the term “Luddite” has come to mean in the present day. However, historians have demonstrated that, while the original Luddites were hostile to new machinery, they were not simply trying to break machines but were using the threat of damaging machinery as a bargaining chip to win better wages and employment conditions from employers (Hobsbawn, 1964).
4 The United States employs a cumbersome, two-step process for union certification in which workers must first sign cards indicating their interest in forming a union, then, at a later date, vote. Under the Taft–Hartley Act, all of this must take place under the watchful bureaucratic eye of the National Labor Relations Board.
5 According to its 2018 Annual Report, General Motors employed about 173,000 people in total in 2018, with about 40% of these employed outside the United States. Recent decisions to close plants in the United States (including the Lordstown plant near Youngstown, OH) and to shift production elsewhere may increase the share of non-U.S. workers in future.
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