COMMENTATOR (COMM): Previously on Life...
JON ALPERT: We have an internet hook-up with Geraldo.
MIQUEL JORGE: People like Geraldo suffer because we don't have work.
NOAM CHOMSKY: The movement of people is much less free.
NAOMI KLEIN: This is presented to us as either those workers will have terrible jobs or they will have no jobs at all.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: What constitutes exploitation.
GOBIND NANKANI: Look at the bigger picture.
JON ALPERT: You could wind up joining Geraldo on the unemployment line.
GERALDO: Mio triste (I'm sad).
DJ SYNC: The sound of Philadelphia' 95 point seven, Philly's new Jammin' Gold, We're cookin' like a pressure cooker inside...
COMM: This week on Life - how globalization is changing the future of work in the world's biggest economy.
DJ SYNC: Fifty in Centre City. Kicking off another music jam. . .
MUSIC:
"His father works some days for fourteen hours. . . and you can bet he barely makes a dollar."
COMM: Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love - the city where America declared independence. America is booming - record growth, record job creation.
MUSIC CONTINUES:
"Living just enough, just enough for the city..."
COMM: But there is another Philadelphia Story - the story of what happens to those in the global economy who don't quite make it. Inner city Kensington has seen thousands of jobs go to overseas competitors. Those who've lost out find brotherly love in the offices of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union.
CHERI HONKALA: Nice to meet you. Hey if everyone wants to come and start getting on the bus...
COMM: A busload of activists, with a busload of faith...
MUSIC: "Well, I went down to the rich man's house, and I took back what he stole from me."
COMM: They are few today - but even some close to the Clinton White House believe that one day they could be many.
MUSIC continues "Under my feet..yeah. ...under my feet.
PROF ROBERT REICH, Brandeis University: The people who are most hurt right now by globalization are blue collar and relatively poor workers who used to have the factory jobs in the developed nations. And unless we come up for a solution to their plight and their insecurities - and sometimes and in some nations, their lack of jobs - we are going to see a backlash against globalization that will hurt all of us ultimately.
COMM: First stop, a lighting company where two-thirds of the jobs have gone to Asian competitors in the last two years.
CHERI HONKOLA: We just want to welcome sisters and brothers from the United Electrical Workers and want to thank you for allowing us to talk to you today and hear about the struggle that you're dealing with.
VOXPOP1 (CATHY BURKE): I started here 28 years ago with two dollars and ten cents. Twenty eight years later I'm only making eleven dollars - that's a disgrace.
VOXPOP2 (SERETHA TAYLOR): I'm 57 years old, will soon be 58, and I've spent all my time with Philadelphia Glass Bending, and it will be hard for me to go someplace and try to get another job some place.
JIM ERMI: The problem that the workers in this local are running into lately is more and more production jobs have been lost here at Philadelphia Glass Bending. Because this company's competitors are bringing in the same products from Korea and Taiwan at a far lower cost... And I'm fighting against this corporate-greed driven race to the bottom on wages, living standards, and environmental issues, where the country that will sell its labour for the cheapest price will attract all the corporations and their factories and their money and...
COMM: Only one in four of those who lose factory jobs will find another that pays as well. America has lost almost a million manufacturing jobs in thirty years. This garment industry has lost ninety five per cent of its workers in a decade.
JOHN FOX: We don't mind fair competition - England is fair competition, Germany is fair competition, France. But not Asia where people work twelve hours, eighteen hours a day, get fifty cents an hour, get twenty cents - and some of it is taken away from them - how can we compete? There is no justice - we're looking for justice, I don't know how we're going to find it. Unless globalization, unless the western countries, get together and say enough is enough - we want fair trade, fair competition.
DOLL WILSON: For the people abroad - I don't think it's good news for them because they can't even buy what they make.
COMM: But the rate of job loss in manufacturing is declining - and bad news in America may be good news elsewhere.
PROF. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, George Mason University: I do not think it is possible to argue that globalization is anything but a progressive force, because it is a very efficient force for matching capital to labour, and it employs people where they can be used most productively in the world economy. The problem comes - in particularly developed countries - when you get low skilled workers whose jobs compete directly against workers in poor countries. And every job that's lost in Britain or the United States may result in three or four jobs being created in Malaysia or Vietnam, or some other poor country. That is a net gain it seems to me to global welfare.
QUESTION: But a local inequality in one country, you're saying, may be globally a sacrifice worth paying for living conditions raised elsewhere?
FUKUYAMA: If you had a Fourth International, where the Left was truly interested in the welfare of workers and global inequality, they would be all in favour of globalization because it is in fact tending to equalize wages across the first and third world divide. It's only within a first world country that it creates a problem.
COMM: The problem here is that people have had to take lower wages to try and hang onto their jobs. Real hourly earnings for men in manufacturing have fallen by a quarter in 25 years. And that's had a knock-on effect downtown - with office staff having to work longer hours for the same return.
PROF. NOAM CHOMSKY (Massachusetts Inst. of Technology): For the majority of the population in the United States, globalisation has meant much higher work hours. So the average family works a couple of months a year more than they did 20 years ago. And that's to maintain stagnating or declining wages. So average wages for say for non-supervisory workers wages have not come close to their early 1970's level.
QUESTION: What's that got to do with globalisation?
CHOMSKY: Yeah, it's got a lot to do with it. I mean it has to do a lot to do with the... one, you can argue about the actual amount of job flow, but one thing is very clear - the threat of job transfer is a very strong disciplinary - has a very strong disciplinary effect. So you don't ask for wages if you're - if you can be faced with the threat of job transfer.
COMM: But your job may be safer if your company does what no-one else can. Like making the guitar that Elvis Presley played. The Martin guitar company has fought off the Asian competition that wrecked the garment industry.
CHRIS MARTIN: There used to be a significant amount of clothing manufacturing done in Pennsylvania, particularly in eastern Pennsylvania - most of that was done by women - that work has gone. Clothing manufacturing in Pennsylvania has by and large been decimated. It's gone, it's gone to the Far East, it's gone to Bangladesh, it's gone to Mexico. And we found a tremendous workforce available because these women wanted to work - they knew what it was like to work in a factory, and we brought them in, we taught them how to work with wood. We taught them how to work with wire, to make strings. And the thing that is most exciting to me, and makes me feel really proud of our culture, is that a lot of them will come up to me and say they never knew that a manufacturing environment could also be a pleasant place...
COMM: Other companies may subcontract to Asia, rely on robots or ever-lower wages. Martin is taking advantage of the global economy - promoting itself as the world's leading. And making sure its workers share directly in rising profits and productivity.
CHRIS MARTIN: We just distributed the profit sharing cheques on Monday. The profit sharing pool is over two million dollars, and you give somebody a profit sharing cheque that's carved out of a pool that size, they open up the cheque. And they start jumping up and down, and screaming because all of a sudden, all that work - all the effort, all the agony - is worth it. So in our case wages have NOT been stagnant, and we have found a way to become more efficient and to share the rewards.
COMM: But in Philadelphia such stories are an exception. And it's not only manual workers who're struggling. You're now as likely to lose your job in finance as in a factory. Machines replaced manual jobs. Now computers are replacing middle class ones. Having a porch may no longer mean a safe pension.
TERRY O'LEARY: When I went into the banking business in the late Eighties most people, who were worked at the banks planned on working there for thirty to forty years. And a lot of people were. But as technology has taken over, and as our entire way of living has sped up, unfortunately the people who are suffering for it are usually the middle class people - the people making that forty to sixty thousand dollars a year.
COMM: When Terry O'Leary was downsized, he retrained as a music therapist. If you're fired in finance, you have a better than evens chance of finding new work - but only a one in three chance of a job that pays as well.
O'LEARY: Despite the fantastic new employment numbers we see in the United States, a lot of the new jobs are minimum wage jobs - they're five dollars an hour, they're not twenty dollars an hour - which is what we're used to working for.
COMM: Many of Terry's friends and neighbours have been downsized too.
TERRY O'LEARY: Their options are limited - they can go back for a job at maybe half their salary, or they're forced into working two or three jobs.
QUESTION: This is what's called the vanishing middle, the squeeze on the middle class?
TERRY O'LEARY: I believe that's a good term for it. The people that you used to socialize with, and get together with, and work in co-ordination with, they're just not in the positions they used to be in before. You're walking into a convenience store and seeing someone who used to be a vice president of a bank cutting deli meat at the counter to make ends meet.
PROFESSOR ROBERT REICH: The middle class has been somewhat squeezed in industrialised nations by the new global economy. On the one hand there are great opportunities - if you are willing to work very hard and get the right education, make the right connections, sell yourself. But you are also likely to be outsourced or downsized, or sub-contracted, or in other ways - working in a more frenzied way for your income and your economic security.
COMM: There are new jobs - twenty eight million in the service sector in the last thirty years. They include jobs that can't be sent abroad or done by computers. But these are often relatively low wage jobs. And increasing numbers - now twenty eight per cent - are part-time.
QUESTION: Aren't there plenty of jobs in the inner cities now for people who want them?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think that that may be true, but the issue is no longer something that can be measured by unemployment rates. That these very low unemployment rates that we're seeing - particularly in the US - are masking massive transformations in the workforce. Trends towards part-time, temp and so called 'McWork'. And this is the kind of work we're getting in the new economy - it's very unstable, it's - we hear all this talk of flexibility, but of course this flexibility is for the employers- the employees have very little flexibility even for these very low wage jobs.
COMM: Not all Philadelphia's new service sector jobs are low wage. On the city's Stock Exchange, Dot Com shares have soared. And the new technologies don't just destroy jobs, they also create them. At VerticalNet, the hard hats are a joke - Here they make their money by building business-to-business websites in cyberspace. Multi millionaire founders like Mike McNulty are now planning their own charitable foundations.
MIKE McNULTY: We've grown from 1995 from four people when this company started, and today we are closing in on 900 people in the company. We went public about a year ago, and we were valued at about two hundred million dollars a year ago. So it's really just in the last year that we've gone from a two hundred million dollar valuation to an eight billion dollar valuation.. I could make a case that eight billion is undervaluing what we'll be worth five years from now.
QUESTION: Still undervaluing?
McNULTY: Right. Neither my partner nor I had any money really to start with. We had an idea - we went out and were able to raise a little bit of capital money, we worked hard, and kept refining the idea, and as we say 'What a country!'
COMM: Workers in computer systems make about a thousand dollars a week - twice the national average wage. And there are almost three times as many of them as ten years ago.
MIKE McNULTY: I see the turn of events, and the way the economy's going as a way of offering opportunities for every economic class. There's opportunities to go to school, to develop the skills to move yourself into the next bracket up. And, as I say, I think there's never been a better chance at real opportunity than here in the States than today.
COMM: These are globalization's winners - the so-called "digital nomads" who can sell their skills across the globe and are paid accordingly - often with handsome stock options. They're leaving the rest behind.
PROF. LESTER THUROW, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Basically what's happening is the bottom two thirds of the population - that group that has a high school education or less - has been slowly sinking or stagnant. While the top one third of the population, which is basically that with skills above the high school level, had been doing very well in our economy. And so you see this enormous spreading out of the distribution of income. And the same thing happens of course on the distribution of wealth.
IRWIN STELZER, Director of Regulatory Studies, The Hudson Institute: We have indeed had a lag between the rise in productivity, which is ongoing, and the rise in incomes of some members of the workforce - and that is now reversing. What's happening now is there's catch-up, and incomes of workers have started to rise to keep pace with productivity...
QUESTION: So you think as globalization proceeds that there will be in time a more equitable distribution of income?
STELZER: Well, I'm an economist, not a priest - so I don't know as much about equity as perhaps some of the other people you might talk to. But there will certainly be an... everybody will be better off.
COMM: The fear is the winners may retreat into their own private world - linked up in cyberspace, but cut off from the less well rewarded majority. Welfare rights activist Cheri Honkala showed us just one of America's twenty thousand private communities - where more than three million Americans now live behind gates, and here even moats.
CHERI HONKOLA: I'm standing in front of gated community - this is called Bluebell. It really is representative of the extreme gap between the rich and the poor here in this country. And only a very small section of the population can afford to live under these conditions. And many of these folks will be employed in hi-technology jobs, and will have life experiences very different and removed from the majority of workers in this country, that are working two and three, maybe even four, jobs just to have a roof over their head.
ROBERT REICH: It is undoubtedly difficult to elicit from the more fortunate members of society, the degree of commitment and resource necessary to widen the circle of prosperity. And I think that only when the well off understand that a backlash against globalisation will hurt them - will undermine their fortunes, will restrict their opportunities. And that they are inviting a backlash by not providing adequate education and training and healthcare for everyone in society - it's only then that they may relent.
COMM: In the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, giant murals of the classless vision of American democracy. America has also signed up to the UN Social Summit with its commitment to "equitable distribution of income" and the Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees 'just and favourable conditions of work and remuneration'.
NOAM CHOMSKY: There is a document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I mean, it happens that the West radically opposes it. The leaders of the relativist camp which reject the Universal Declaration, or the United States, Britain and others - because they completely reject, on principle, the socio-economic components which include for example the right to work. In fact the United States regards them as preposterous, a letter to Santa Claus, I mean grotesque - won't sign conventions supporting them, Britain's not a lot different. So if we take our own lofty rhetoric seriously, which we like to use to attack others when it's useful - but if we take it seriously for ourselves - yes, there's people have a right to a decent life.
JUAN SOMAVIA, Director General, International Labour Organization: When people raise the UN declaration of human rights and say look, it promises the right to work, isn't that just pie in the sky? I don't think that the right to work is pie in the sky because there have been - history's full of pie in the skies. You know, slavery would be with us forever, women would never vote, trade unions would never exist, apartheid would never go away, the Berlin Wall would be a permanent fixture. I mean there are so many things that actually happened that of course the right to work, I believe, is something that people have a right to aspire to. The big problem is, you know - does the global economy, is the global economy, capable of delivering decent work for all? And if it is not, then we have to see what happens with the rest - the rest cannot be simply treated as poor people, incompetent, incapable, you know, who really didn't know how to gear up to - you know - the hi-tech economy that we have today - it's their problem.
MUSIC: "Well I went down to the welfare office... ...and took back what he stole from me".
COMM: For the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, the losers in the global economy are everyone's problem. Today, they're protesting welfare cuts. Globalization's losers, they warn, are being abandoned. They want their message heard beyond the streets of Philadelphia.
CHERI HONKALA: It is today that we will make sure that poor people's voices are not unheard, and that we are not invisible in Philadelphia or in the country. . .(applause) I love my country - I love it so much - that I think there is something really wrong with the majority of people that live in this country, that can't have access to the things that they see every day, we see it constantly on the television. We see people living in their beautiful homes, we see people driving their beautiful cars, we see people with an ability to take their children on vacations. But the majority of the folks that live here, that I see on a day-to-day basis in Philadelphia and across the entire country, most of us are trying to figure how do we hold on to the very little bit that we got - and a lot of us don't even have that little bit. And something has to be done to show that this situation exists in this country and this is not the model people want.
QUESTION: Do you believe that the American economy is a model for globalization and the rest of the world?
IRWIN STELZER: Yes, if by that you understand that I mean its not perfect. But certainly as the various models that are on offer it seems to produce greater wealth for more people than any other model. The Soviet Union has collapsed, its mini model in Cuba is a shambles, there's double digit unemployment in socialist France. So I would say that if you're looking for a model - but not a perfect model - America is the place that the world has to look.
COMM: A few busloads of activists are unlikely to change America's image as globalization's model economy.
CROWD CHANTING: "What do we want - living wage jobs. When do we want it? Now!"
COMM: But the message that globalization is creating too many losers has been widely echoed even within the Clinton administration. Philadelphia is the city where the Liberty Bell once rang to declare America an independent democracy. Today they're chopping up a paper replica.
CHERI HONKOLA: Wear these stickers. Because we want to make sure that they understand. And we will not disappear. God bless you and thank you for coming!
COMM: But there is a wider message from this booming city - - a message you can hear not only just from activists like Cheri Honkola. The message that it's not so much poverty that threatens democracy as inequality.
LESTER THUROW: You're playing with fire when you talk about these kind of inequalities. Now nobody knows how far can it go... if you have had twenty years of rising inequality in America, with very little kick back, could we have another twenty years? - Maybe. But at some point it gets out of control, and it's completely inconsistent with democracy in the long run.
PHILLY DJ: The sound of Philadelphia's 95 point Seven, Philly's new Jammin' Gold. I'm sending this one out to my crew in North Philadelphia. Bron and Gerone, the crew that used to hang out at the Impulse with Chucks Bar right down the street!...
MUSIC: "His mother.... you'd best believe she hardly gets a penny... living just enough, just enough for the city."
COMM: In Philadelphia globalization has meant big rewards - but not yet for the majority.
MUSIC CONTINUES: "His mother goes to scrub the floors... and she hardly gets a penny... Living just enough, just enough ...for the city".
COMM: Real hourly wages in the USA are still lower than when Stevie Wonder wrote 'Living in the City' - in 1973.
DJ SYNC: I can't play it right now. I don't know what time I'm gonna get it on. OK Baby. I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go, bye. . .
END
JON ALPERT: We have an internet hook-up with Geraldo.
MIQUEL JORGE: People like Geraldo suffer because we don't have work.
NOAM CHOMSKY: The movement of people is much less free.
NAOMI KLEIN: This is presented to us as either those workers will have terrible jobs or they will have no jobs at all.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: What constitutes exploitation.
GOBIND NANKANI: Look at the bigger picture.
JON ALPERT: You could wind up joining Geraldo on the unemployment line.
GERALDO: Mio triste (I'm sad).
DJ SYNC: The sound of Philadelphia' 95 point seven, Philly's new Jammin' Gold, We're cookin' like a pressure cooker inside...
COMM: This week on Life - how globalization is changing the future of work in the world's biggest economy.
DJ SYNC: Fifty in Centre City. Kicking off another music jam. . .
MUSIC:
"His father works some days for fourteen hours. . . and you can bet he barely makes a dollar."
COMM: Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love - the city where America declared independence. America is booming - record growth, record job creation.
MUSIC CONTINUES:
"Living just enough, just enough for the city..."
COMM: But there is another Philadelphia Story - the story of what happens to those in the global economy who don't quite make it. Inner city Kensington has seen thousands of jobs go to overseas competitors. Those who've lost out find brotherly love in the offices of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union.
CHERI HONKALA: Nice to meet you. Hey if everyone wants to come and start getting on the bus...
COMM: A busload of activists, with a busload of faith...
MUSIC: "Well, I went down to the rich man's house, and I took back what he stole from me."
COMM: They are few today - but even some close to the Clinton White House believe that one day they could be many.
MUSIC continues "Under my feet..yeah. ...under my feet.
PROF ROBERT REICH, Brandeis University: The people who are most hurt right now by globalization are blue collar and relatively poor workers who used to have the factory jobs in the developed nations. And unless we come up for a solution to their plight and their insecurities - and sometimes and in some nations, their lack of jobs - we are going to see a backlash against globalization that will hurt all of us ultimately.
COMM: First stop, a lighting company where two-thirds of the jobs have gone to Asian competitors in the last two years.
CHERI HONKOLA: We just want to welcome sisters and brothers from the United Electrical Workers and want to thank you for allowing us to talk to you today and hear about the struggle that you're dealing with.
VOXPOP1 (CATHY BURKE): I started here 28 years ago with two dollars and ten cents. Twenty eight years later I'm only making eleven dollars - that's a disgrace.
VOXPOP2 (SERETHA TAYLOR): I'm 57 years old, will soon be 58, and I've spent all my time with Philadelphia Glass Bending, and it will be hard for me to go someplace and try to get another job some place.
JIM ERMI: The problem that the workers in this local are running into lately is more and more production jobs have been lost here at Philadelphia Glass Bending. Because this company's competitors are bringing in the same products from Korea and Taiwan at a far lower cost... And I'm fighting against this corporate-greed driven race to the bottom on wages, living standards, and environmental issues, where the country that will sell its labour for the cheapest price will attract all the corporations and their factories and their money and...
COMM: Only one in four of those who lose factory jobs will find another that pays as well. America has lost almost a million manufacturing jobs in thirty years. This garment industry has lost ninety five per cent of its workers in a decade.
JOHN FOX: We don't mind fair competition - England is fair competition, Germany is fair competition, France. But not Asia where people work twelve hours, eighteen hours a day, get fifty cents an hour, get twenty cents - and some of it is taken away from them - how can we compete? There is no justice - we're looking for justice, I don't know how we're going to find it. Unless globalization, unless the western countries, get together and say enough is enough - we want fair trade, fair competition.
DOLL WILSON: For the people abroad - I don't think it's good news for them because they can't even buy what they make.
COMM: But the rate of job loss in manufacturing is declining - and bad news in America may be good news elsewhere.
PROF. FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, George Mason University: I do not think it is possible to argue that globalization is anything but a progressive force, because it is a very efficient force for matching capital to labour, and it employs people where they can be used most productively in the world economy. The problem comes - in particularly developed countries - when you get low skilled workers whose jobs compete directly against workers in poor countries. And every job that's lost in Britain or the United States may result in three or four jobs being created in Malaysia or Vietnam, or some other poor country. That is a net gain it seems to me to global welfare.
QUESTION: But a local inequality in one country, you're saying, may be globally a sacrifice worth paying for living conditions raised elsewhere?
FUKUYAMA: If you had a Fourth International, where the Left was truly interested in the welfare of workers and global inequality, they would be all in favour of globalization because it is in fact tending to equalize wages across the first and third world divide. It's only within a first world country that it creates a problem.
COMM: The problem here is that people have had to take lower wages to try and hang onto their jobs. Real hourly earnings for men in manufacturing have fallen by a quarter in 25 years. And that's had a knock-on effect downtown - with office staff having to work longer hours for the same return.
PROF. NOAM CHOMSKY (Massachusetts Inst. of Technology): For the majority of the population in the United States, globalisation has meant much higher work hours. So the average family works a couple of months a year more than they did 20 years ago. And that's to maintain stagnating or declining wages. So average wages for say for non-supervisory workers wages have not come close to their early 1970's level.
QUESTION: What's that got to do with globalisation?
CHOMSKY: Yeah, it's got a lot to do with it. I mean it has to do a lot to do with the... one, you can argue about the actual amount of job flow, but one thing is very clear - the threat of job transfer is a very strong disciplinary - has a very strong disciplinary effect. So you don't ask for wages if you're - if you can be faced with the threat of job transfer.
COMM: But your job may be safer if your company does what no-one else can. Like making the guitar that Elvis Presley played. The Martin guitar company has fought off the Asian competition that wrecked the garment industry.
CHRIS MARTIN: There used to be a significant amount of clothing manufacturing done in Pennsylvania, particularly in eastern Pennsylvania - most of that was done by women - that work has gone. Clothing manufacturing in Pennsylvania has by and large been decimated. It's gone, it's gone to the Far East, it's gone to Bangladesh, it's gone to Mexico. And we found a tremendous workforce available because these women wanted to work - they knew what it was like to work in a factory, and we brought them in, we taught them how to work with wood. We taught them how to work with wire, to make strings. And the thing that is most exciting to me, and makes me feel really proud of our culture, is that a lot of them will come up to me and say they never knew that a manufacturing environment could also be a pleasant place...
COMM: Other companies may subcontract to Asia, rely on robots or ever-lower wages. Martin is taking advantage of the global economy - promoting itself as the world's leading. And making sure its workers share directly in rising profits and productivity.
CHRIS MARTIN: We just distributed the profit sharing cheques on Monday. The profit sharing pool is over two million dollars, and you give somebody a profit sharing cheque that's carved out of a pool that size, they open up the cheque. And they start jumping up and down, and screaming because all of a sudden, all that work - all the effort, all the agony - is worth it. So in our case wages have NOT been stagnant, and we have found a way to become more efficient and to share the rewards.
COMM: But in Philadelphia such stories are an exception. And it's not only manual workers who're struggling. You're now as likely to lose your job in finance as in a factory. Machines replaced manual jobs. Now computers are replacing middle class ones. Having a porch may no longer mean a safe pension.
TERRY O'LEARY: When I went into the banking business in the late Eighties most people, who were worked at the banks planned on working there for thirty to forty years. And a lot of people were. But as technology has taken over, and as our entire way of living has sped up, unfortunately the people who are suffering for it are usually the middle class people - the people making that forty to sixty thousand dollars a year.
COMM: When Terry O'Leary was downsized, he retrained as a music therapist. If you're fired in finance, you have a better than evens chance of finding new work - but only a one in three chance of a job that pays as well.
O'LEARY: Despite the fantastic new employment numbers we see in the United States, a lot of the new jobs are minimum wage jobs - they're five dollars an hour, they're not twenty dollars an hour - which is what we're used to working for.
COMM: Many of Terry's friends and neighbours have been downsized too.
TERRY O'LEARY: Their options are limited - they can go back for a job at maybe half their salary, or they're forced into working two or three jobs.
QUESTION: This is what's called the vanishing middle, the squeeze on the middle class?
TERRY O'LEARY: I believe that's a good term for it. The people that you used to socialize with, and get together with, and work in co-ordination with, they're just not in the positions they used to be in before. You're walking into a convenience store and seeing someone who used to be a vice president of a bank cutting deli meat at the counter to make ends meet.
PROFESSOR ROBERT REICH: The middle class has been somewhat squeezed in industrialised nations by the new global economy. On the one hand there are great opportunities - if you are willing to work very hard and get the right education, make the right connections, sell yourself. But you are also likely to be outsourced or downsized, or sub-contracted, or in other ways - working in a more frenzied way for your income and your economic security.
COMM: There are new jobs - twenty eight million in the service sector in the last thirty years. They include jobs that can't be sent abroad or done by computers. But these are often relatively low wage jobs. And increasing numbers - now twenty eight per cent - are part-time.
QUESTION: Aren't there plenty of jobs in the inner cities now for people who want them?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, I think that that may be true, but the issue is no longer something that can be measured by unemployment rates. That these very low unemployment rates that we're seeing - particularly in the US - are masking massive transformations in the workforce. Trends towards part-time, temp and so called 'McWork'. And this is the kind of work we're getting in the new economy - it's very unstable, it's - we hear all this talk of flexibility, but of course this flexibility is for the employers- the employees have very little flexibility even for these very low wage jobs.
COMM: Not all Philadelphia's new service sector jobs are low wage. On the city's Stock Exchange, Dot Com shares have soared. And the new technologies don't just destroy jobs, they also create them. At VerticalNet, the hard hats are a joke - Here they make their money by building business-to-business websites in cyberspace. Multi millionaire founders like Mike McNulty are now planning their own charitable foundations.
MIKE McNULTY: We've grown from 1995 from four people when this company started, and today we are closing in on 900 people in the company. We went public about a year ago, and we were valued at about two hundred million dollars a year ago. So it's really just in the last year that we've gone from a two hundred million dollar valuation to an eight billion dollar valuation.. I could make a case that eight billion is undervaluing what we'll be worth five years from now.
QUESTION: Still undervaluing?
McNULTY: Right. Neither my partner nor I had any money really to start with. We had an idea - we went out and were able to raise a little bit of capital money, we worked hard, and kept refining the idea, and as we say 'What a country!'
COMM: Workers in computer systems make about a thousand dollars a week - twice the national average wage. And there are almost three times as many of them as ten years ago.
MIKE McNULTY: I see the turn of events, and the way the economy's going as a way of offering opportunities for every economic class. There's opportunities to go to school, to develop the skills to move yourself into the next bracket up. And, as I say, I think there's never been a better chance at real opportunity than here in the States than today.
COMM: These are globalization's winners - the so-called "digital nomads" who can sell their skills across the globe and are paid accordingly - often with handsome stock options. They're leaving the rest behind.
PROF. LESTER THUROW, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Basically what's happening is the bottom two thirds of the population - that group that has a high school education or less - has been slowly sinking or stagnant. While the top one third of the population, which is basically that with skills above the high school level, had been doing very well in our economy. And so you see this enormous spreading out of the distribution of income. And the same thing happens of course on the distribution of wealth.
IRWIN STELZER, Director of Regulatory Studies, The Hudson Institute: We have indeed had a lag between the rise in productivity, which is ongoing, and the rise in incomes of some members of the workforce - and that is now reversing. What's happening now is there's catch-up, and incomes of workers have started to rise to keep pace with productivity...
QUESTION: So you think as globalization proceeds that there will be in time a more equitable distribution of income?
STELZER: Well, I'm an economist, not a priest - so I don't know as much about equity as perhaps some of the other people you might talk to. But there will certainly be an... everybody will be better off.
COMM: The fear is the winners may retreat into their own private world - linked up in cyberspace, but cut off from the less well rewarded majority. Welfare rights activist Cheri Honkala showed us just one of America's twenty thousand private communities - where more than three million Americans now live behind gates, and here even moats.
CHERI HONKOLA: I'm standing in front of gated community - this is called Bluebell. It really is representative of the extreme gap between the rich and the poor here in this country. And only a very small section of the population can afford to live under these conditions. And many of these folks will be employed in hi-technology jobs, and will have life experiences very different and removed from the majority of workers in this country, that are working two and three, maybe even four, jobs just to have a roof over their head.
ROBERT REICH: It is undoubtedly difficult to elicit from the more fortunate members of society, the degree of commitment and resource necessary to widen the circle of prosperity. And I think that only when the well off understand that a backlash against globalisation will hurt them - will undermine their fortunes, will restrict their opportunities. And that they are inviting a backlash by not providing adequate education and training and healthcare for everyone in society - it's only then that they may relent.
COMM: In the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, giant murals of the classless vision of American democracy. America has also signed up to the UN Social Summit with its commitment to "equitable distribution of income" and the Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees 'just and favourable conditions of work and remuneration'.
NOAM CHOMSKY: There is a document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I mean, it happens that the West radically opposes it. The leaders of the relativist camp which reject the Universal Declaration, or the United States, Britain and others - because they completely reject, on principle, the socio-economic components which include for example the right to work. In fact the United States regards them as preposterous, a letter to Santa Claus, I mean grotesque - won't sign conventions supporting them, Britain's not a lot different. So if we take our own lofty rhetoric seriously, which we like to use to attack others when it's useful - but if we take it seriously for ourselves - yes, there's people have a right to a decent life.
JUAN SOMAVIA, Director General, International Labour Organization: When people raise the UN declaration of human rights and say look, it promises the right to work, isn't that just pie in the sky? I don't think that the right to work is pie in the sky because there have been - history's full of pie in the skies. You know, slavery would be with us forever, women would never vote, trade unions would never exist, apartheid would never go away, the Berlin Wall would be a permanent fixture. I mean there are so many things that actually happened that of course the right to work, I believe, is something that people have a right to aspire to. The big problem is, you know - does the global economy, is the global economy, capable of delivering decent work for all? And if it is not, then we have to see what happens with the rest - the rest cannot be simply treated as poor people, incompetent, incapable, you know, who really didn't know how to gear up to - you know - the hi-tech economy that we have today - it's their problem.
MUSIC: "Well I went down to the welfare office... ...and took back what he stole from me".
COMM: For the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, the losers in the global economy are everyone's problem. Today, they're protesting welfare cuts. Globalization's losers, they warn, are being abandoned. They want their message heard beyond the streets of Philadelphia.
CHERI HONKALA: It is today that we will make sure that poor people's voices are not unheard, and that we are not invisible in Philadelphia or in the country. . .(applause) I love my country - I love it so much - that I think there is something really wrong with the majority of people that live in this country, that can't have access to the things that they see every day, we see it constantly on the television. We see people living in their beautiful homes, we see people driving their beautiful cars, we see people with an ability to take their children on vacations. But the majority of the folks that live here, that I see on a day-to-day basis in Philadelphia and across the entire country, most of us are trying to figure how do we hold on to the very little bit that we got - and a lot of us don't even have that little bit. And something has to be done to show that this situation exists in this country and this is not the model people want.
QUESTION: Do you believe that the American economy is a model for globalization and the rest of the world?
IRWIN STELZER: Yes, if by that you understand that I mean its not perfect. But certainly as the various models that are on offer it seems to produce greater wealth for more people than any other model. The Soviet Union has collapsed, its mini model in Cuba is a shambles, there's double digit unemployment in socialist France. So I would say that if you're looking for a model - but not a perfect model - America is the place that the world has to look.
COMM: A few busloads of activists are unlikely to change America's image as globalization's model economy.
CROWD CHANTING: "What do we want - living wage jobs. When do we want it? Now!"
COMM: But the message that globalization is creating too many losers has been widely echoed even within the Clinton administration. Philadelphia is the city where the Liberty Bell once rang to declare America an independent democracy. Today they're chopping up a paper replica.
CHERI HONKOLA: Wear these stickers. Because we want to make sure that they understand. And we will not disappear. God bless you and thank you for coming!
COMM: But there is a wider message from this booming city - - a message you can hear not only just from activists like Cheri Honkola. The message that it's not so much poverty that threatens democracy as inequality.
LESTER THUROW: You're playing with fire when you talk about these kind of inequalities. Now nobody knows how far can it go... if you have had twenty years of rising inequality in America, with very little kick back, could we have another twenty years? - Maybe. But at some point it gets out of control, and it's completely inconsistent with democracy in the long run.
PHILLY DJ: The sound of Philadelphia's 95 point Seven, Philly's new Jammin' Gold. I'm sending this one out to my crew in North Philadelphia. Bron and Gerone, the crew that used to hang out at the Impulse with Chucks Bar right down the street!...
MUSIC: "His mother.... you'd best believe she hardly gets a penny... living just enough, just enough for the city."
COMM: In Philadelphia globalization has meant big rewards - but not yet for the majority.
MUSIC CONTINUES: "His mother goes to scrub the floors... and she hardly gets a penny... Living just enough, just enough ...for the city".
COMM: Real hourly wages in the USA are still lower than when Stevie Wonder wrote 'Living in the City' - in 1973.
DJ SYNC: I can't play it right now. I don't know what time I'm gonna get it on. OK Baby. I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go, bye. . .
END