Please work from home: The immobility of labour in the age of globalization

Abstract

The Questions: How are we to come to terms with the immobility of labour in the age of globalization? How is this ‘immobility’ related to the ‘fantasy of mobility’ that is underpinned in the process of immigration to affluent countries like the United States? What are the differences between the internal and external forms of mobility in emerging economies like India? How does the dominant role of the United States as the primary driver of the international economy help us to differentiate between the tenor and vehicle of globalization? What, finally, is the link between the contemporary ‘discourse of management’ and the political economy of ‘globalization’? The Answers: Labour suffers from a relative immobility due to cultural factors, but this problem is endemic to not only external mobility (i.e., immigration) as a demographic process, but also to the persistent differences and value systems of internal mobility between managers and workers within a given economy. The traditional fantasy of external mobility is underpinned in a socio-economic structure. Being able to traverse this structure is seen as a function of the worker’s ‘motivation’ to get on in life. Immigrating to affluent nations (especially the United States) in pursuit of the ‘American Dream’ is the historically privileged example of external mobility. Off-shoring works with the fantasy of internal mobility. Hence the idea of ‘working from home’ by accessing the Internet to take advantage of ‘cost arbitrage’ initially, but of local ‘knowledge and talent’ eventually in order to successfully straddle the BPO-KPO value chain in the emerging economies. _ The ambivalence at the heart of the projects of globalization stems from the American mediation of this project. Governments in emerging economies find this mediation difficult to come to terms with because of their colonial past and the domination of the international economy by the United States. The ‘trade-off’ between control and growth will have to be negotiated by emerging economies within the ‘discourse of management.’ To do this, emerging economies will have to develop a high level of comfort with the international division of labour (without dismissing the off-shoring process as the exploitation of the knowledge worker at the bottom of the value chain). Emerging economies will also have to work-through the idea that the modalities and processes of modernization that have kept them busy in the post-independence era has now morphed itself into the ‘discourse of management’ as the vehicle of globalization. Globalization therefore marks continuity with the process of modernization that stems originally from the project of the Enlightenment in Europe, but which found its most successful expression in the American project of ‘liberal democracy’; hence, perhaps the persistence of the American flavour of globalization.