Globalization Can Be Good for American Workers

No matter how much politicians promise to protect us, technology and globalization will continue to transform the American workplace, driving the U.S. economy to abandon simpler, labor-intensive production processes, turn increasingly toward more mechanized, digitized, high-value efforts, and, accordingly, demand an ever-better-trained workforce. Though these trends should generally create prosperity, they will also bring significant social disruptions. Indeed, they already have: income disparities between rich and poor have widened, with the skilled and educated seeing enhanced earning opportunities and the less skilled and less educated finding their options constrained. Less and less is left of the old, stable middle class, the product of an era when the semiskilled could maintain security in a job for life. Unless we can better prepare workers for this dramatic economic shift, social decline will worsen.