The New Offshoring of Jobs and Global Development: An Overview of the Contemporary Global Labor Market Lecture #1 Gary Gereffi Duke University
[email protected] International Labor Organization (ILO) 7th Nobel Peace Prize Social Policy Lectures Kingston, Jamaica, December 5, 6 & 7, 2005 The New Offshoring of Jobs and Global Development: An Overview of the Contemporary Global Labor Market1 Gary Gereffi Duke University 1. The Great Global Job Shift A cover story in the February 3, 2003 issue of Business Week highlighted the impact of global outsourcing over the past several decades on the quality and quantity of jobs in both developed and developing countries (Engardio et al., 2003). The first wave of global outsourcing began in the 1960s and 1970s with the exodus of production jobs in shoes, clothing, cheap electronics, and toys. After that, routine service work, like credit-card receipt processing, airline reservations, and the writing of basic software code began to move offshore. Today, the computerization of work, widespread access to the Internet, and high-speed private data networks have allowed a wide range of knowledge-intensive jobs to become more footloose. 2 Global outsourcing reveals many of the key features of contemporary globalization. It deals with international competitiveness in a way that underscores the growing interdependence of developed and developing countries; a huge part of the debate centers around jobs, wages, and skills in different parts of the world; and there is a focus on how economic activities are organized across firms and country boundaries, and where in this production chain value and employment is created.