HOW TO PREPARE FOR THE CHALLENGES OF GLOBALIZATION
© by Rob Ager 2007
People of all ages, races and social groups are already feeling the impact of globalisation. Migration between countries is causing the gap between lower and middle classes to rapidly dissolve. Third world citizens are finding that they have access to some of the opportunities that have long been privileges only of the wealthy west, while western citizens are finding that immigration by third world populations is creating ever more fierce competition for their jobs, which naturally causes salaries across the board to drop. The lower and middle classes of the world will soon find themselves merged as a single economic class that lies somewhere between their two former positions.
This merging is not just caused by migration of workforces. For decades it has been occurring in the form of major western corporations relocating their production activities directly to third world countries. This has provided job opportunities in the third world, but with the catch that those workforces are not protected by the more liberal employment laws of western countries. In effect corporations have shipped abroad for slave-wage labour while still charging high prices for their products once they are shipped back to the western world – an incredibly profitable strategy.
As job markets become over-saturated with workers, wages will not only drop, but employers will be in a position to demand much longer working hours with less benefits for the employee. Combine this with rising house prices and the result is plain to see. Large houses will no longer be occupied by small family units. The vast majority of families will be unable to afford little more than a couple of rooms to themselves. As we are already seeing, large houses across the board will be converted into small apartment blocks, so that the character of western cities lies somewhere between the previous middle class suburbs and the dog-eat-dog shanty towns of the third world – you could call them “techno-shantys”.
These changes are already self-evident in our society regardless of what causes we choose to attribute. The key issue is that we don’t know exactly what quality of life the global citizen is likely to have. It will most definitely be lower than what western citizens are used to, but will it be much higher than what third world countries have endured in recent decades? We just don’t know the answer to this question.
One thing we can be sure of is this. As has always been the case in civilized history, the citizens who have the most unique and sought after skills will be the ones who survive and thrive. Only they will be in a position to command a salary that can afford a three bedroom house for a single family unit without having to work every hour God sends for that privilege. Only they will be able to give quality time to the raising of their own children, while unskilled citizens will be forced by their gruelling work commitments to hand their children increasingly over to nurseries and other institutionalised care centres (thus damaging the social and emotional development of those children). Many couples will simply abstain from having children to avoid the financial burden. Once again we have already been seeing these changes occurring for many years.
Now another area that is in question is whether our education systems will sufficiently adapt to give citizens a fighting chance at earning a good income … or will they simply churn out endless clone citizens whose skills already exist in abundance? The answer is very likely to be the latter because that has historically been the case with institutionalised education.
So the foremost thing that citizens can do to boost their chances in a globalized world is to engage in self-education. Rather than simply paying for packaged skill courses that introduce them to already saturated job markets, the effective global citizen will make use of the internet, public libraries, local community groups and other sources to acquire additional knowledge outside of the existing education systems. This will carry a number of benefits:
Many citizens are already engaging in this kind of self-education and, having had a head start, will be the ones who float higher in the face of workforce saturation. Unfortunately, the vast majority of citizens are still stuck in the mentality of having all their eggs in one compartmentalised basket. They are trapped within a narrowly defined skill set that is already available in abundance.
A core difficulty is that people are so tied up in trying to earn a living with their limited skill sets that they lack the time and motivation to re-educate themselves. It is a downward economic spiral – a pattern that must be broken if the citizen wants a prosperous future. The solution to this is simple. Lower your economic standard of living now so that you can free up time normally spent working your dead-end job. By doing this you will have the time and energy to independently pursue extra skills and knowledge that will bring you larger economic rewards later.
This short-term lowering of one’s own economic living standard can take a variety of forms. It can mean living in smaller and cheaper accommodation or moving to a lowermarket suburb. It can mean booking less holidays abroad or shopping for non-brand named goods. There are many choices that each citizen can make to lower their financial burdens while taking time out to upgrade their own skills sets.
The motivation factor for many people is an even bigger hurdle. Due to negative feelings installed by an uninspiring schooling system and lack of encouragement from parents, some of us perceive studying and learning to be laborious, boring and even frustrating. In the worst cases people have been lead to believe that they are incapable of learning. These mental blocks can be overcome. A key approach is to identify your intellectual weak points and build them up first. Are you a slow reader? Then study some basic English language textbooks. Do you have poor memory skills? Then read up on the subject of memory enhancement.
Aside from building up your weak points, there are some skills and areas of knowledge that are universally valuable, but again are not always efficiently catered for in lower or middle class education systems. These are key areas that are worth taking some time out to educate your self about at least to a basic level. I shall not devote space here to explaining how and why these areas are particularly useful as many of the benefits are plain to see, while still more become apparent once you put those skills into use.
Even just reading a couple of basic textbooks or a series of informational web pages on each of these topics will significantly increase your knowledge-base of the world you live in and the job sector in which you work. Combining good basic knowledge from these areas can open up a new world of opportunities.
This supplementary education concept is also going to become important at the family level. Rather than leaving most of their children’s intellectual development in the hands of a limited schooling system, wise parents will help their children from an early age to acquire additional knowledge and skills. This will later give their children a competitive head start upon entry into the business and job markets.
Another effective life strategy for the global citizen is to have multiple sources of income. It is unclear at the moment, which kinds of workplace skills will be highly valued and which will become saturated or redundant. The development of new technologies and fast political and economic changes are too unpredictable so in a world that is increasingly obsessive about “security”, the economic security of the individual has never looked so uncertain.
If your income is divided between one or two part time jobs and / or a couple of private business ventures then sudden shifts in individual marketplaces and employment sectors will not leave you in an economic hole. If one source of household income suddenly collapses then the remaining sources provide a cushioning stability. Like I said earlier, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
This is also self-evident in that more and more companies are hiring employment agencies to fill their vacancies and almost universally on short-term contracts. Hence citizens are finding themselves bouncing from one job to the next. For what we lose in security though, we also gain in variety – we don’t have to be stuck working in a single work environment for the majority of our adult lives. In this kind of job market wise citizens will keep themselves regularly signed up on the books of a handful of employment agencies so that work opportunities are always immediately available in abundance.
All of the strategies for adapting to globalization that I have described here are already becoming apparent to a still small percentage of society and will be openly discussed more and more as our world changes. Crucially, the citizens who recognise the coming changes now and kick start their self-education process in advance, will be the ones who have the most prosperous and enjoyable ride in the distant future.