Word: greider
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...easing, workers' insecurity remains high. The layoffs that have accompanied technological change have been burned into their minds like code on a ROM chip. The weakening of labor bargaining power, inherent in a global economy where jobs and investment can be shifted freely, has led to what William Greider in the Nation calls a "widening gap between an expanding production base worldwide and an inability of consumers to buy all the new output...
...World, Ready or Not (Simon & Schuster; 528 pages; $27.50) William Greider examines the forces behind this global economic revolution, comparing them to a giant agricultural machine that "throws off enormous mows of wealth and bounty while it leaves behind great furrows of wreckage." Greider, the national editor of Rolling Stone magazine, has a remarkable talent for spotting the economic trends that buffet and baffle ordinary people. He explains cogently why jobs move rapidly from country to country and what impact that has on both the losers and the winners. Drawing on expertise and sources he developed while writing Secrets...
...Greider argues that the economic machine also sows the seeds of its own destruction by generating an ever increasing bounty of goods while impoverishing the workers who might buy them: "Crudely stated, the technology competition leads companies to invest in more output of goods than the global marketplace of consumers can possibly absorb." The inevitable result, he predicts, will be a global depression...
Unfortunately, Greider's solutions could well do more harm than good. He hails West European efforts to protect existing jobs, but doesn't deal with the fact that those policies make employers reluctant to create new jobs, thus driving unemployment rates in those economies to postwar highs. Similarly, his schemes for slowing the flow of money from country to country would punish serious investors as well as speculators. His insistence that peasants in developing nations need protection from inhumane labor practices ignores the overriding desire of many of those people to escape from the grinding poverty of subsistence farming. Greider...
...Greider concludes that by staying its present course, the world will experience a series of "wrenching calamities." This may be overwrought, but the evidence of global dislocation he presents is sufficient to disturb even a committed believer in the economic revolution sweeping the globe today. --By Richard Hornik