Thouvenot 1
Edouard Thouvenot
Professor Hammond
RHET 110
10/29
Employment Hazard
”To him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little he hath shall be taken away” said the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and I believe it to perfectly represent globalization. Many countries were able to develop thanks to their natural resources such as their agriculture, minerals, or oil. Countries like India or China have adopted a model of development based on industrialization with a high productivity but a low salary. This strategy was made to under pay the worth of the workers leaving them with miserable living conditions and a bigger profit margin. Globalization can go back to thousands of years ago when different countries were trading goods, but the effect on the environment has been much worse in the past two decades than it has in all of our history.
Jeffrey Rothfeder, a writer for The Washington Post said in 2015 “ 20 years ago globalization was pitched as a strategy that would raise all
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boats in poor and rich countries alike. In the United States and Europe consumers would have their pick of inexpensive items made by people
inexpensive items made by people thousands of miles away whose pay was much lower than theirs”.The workers have to live in constant fear that their employer isn’t going to act on a pay-cut which the employees will have no choice but to take it as they could export their jobs overseas. In her text, Robyn Meredith gives the statistics about how the salaries have gotten higher over time but doesn’t tell us how much the living expenses are and if they have gone up as well. Even if the people’s salaries have increased, if the rent, electricity, food, or any of those things have increased with it then their lifestyles shall remain similar.
Globalization is also a living hell for the workers and more specifically for their health. China and India are the two main countries in which globalization has expanded but are also the two countries who have the highest pollution rates in history. In China’s biggest cities, the air pollution way too high to attain standard health regulations, and about fifty percent of the their water is too polluted for humans to drink. Their rapid economic development certainly has multiplied their Gross Domestic
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Product by ten and helped many out of poverty, however, it has hurt many more. According to ncbi.gov, “around 2.4 million people have died of cancer or other diseases related to the pollution of the air or the horrific quality of water, and, diseases in association with environmental factors are still the major sources of ill-health; especially among poorer population of China”. At no point does Robyn talk about how it helped the workers socially or care for their healths, but only does she mention the economic positivity. Even China and India’s real estate depends on the air and water quality, knowing the risks that pollution can bring, the best neighborhoods are most likely going to be where there are no industries while the non-rich part of the population is going to be closer and therefor be exposed to higher risks.
A huge problem in most countries is also unemployment. In accordance to estimates written by Robert Scott, from the Economic Policy Institute, “ granting China most favored nation status drained away 3.2 million jobs, including 2.4 million manufacturing jobs.” Globalization has taken away millions of opportunities for people to find jobs in their
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home countries but would rather send them to another smoother labor laws. Some undeveloped countries could also turn to forced or child labor, an increase in human trafficking and slavery . Social welfare then also becomes a problem because of how many benefit from it the more jobs go somewhere else, the more taxpayer money go to these kinds of systems made to help the people. But, many big corporations use the connections made possible by the world’s globalization to pay less taxes by keeping money in tax havens to avoid paying what they usually would legally. On march 13, 2002 the president George W Bush declared that “he was opposing to the Kyoto protocol looking to reduce the pollution of their industries because 80 percent of the world were exempted from it, including China and India, and that it would cause serious damage to the american economy”. Therefore corporations who couldn’t pollute their own country just had to move and do it freely in another.
Globalization is not working in today’s society nor is it doing much good. It is deindustrializing developed countries. Local or family-owned markets are disappearing because because of the unmatched prices of big overseas corporations caused by their cheap labors laws. It affects
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almost all aspects of modern society, such as economical: making huge profits and paying lower taxes, environmental: producing most of the world’s pollution in highly populated places, sanitorial: having low-pay people work and live in a toxic environment, or even social: moving thousands of manufacturing jobs in other countries where laws and rules are easier to bend to the will of corporations. Robyn Meredith’s argument has some valid arguments but they all rely on the economical aspects of globalization without considering the millions people affected by it. The pollution which has hurt many, the millions of jobs lost in other countries, the climate change which could be irreversible. Globalization is bad.