Separate Realities: The Dream and the Iceberg - Scarecrow Press

82 Chapter 2
communication, computers, standardized production procedures, and containerized
shipping, into technical systems that have facilitated (and continue
to facilitate) the globalization of production. 202 These developments
have accelerated the “capital flight” transfer of production facilities from the
United States to nations such as China, Mexico, and Indonesia and have
made the use of cheap Third World labor ever more feasible and profitable.
Numerous U.S. firms, including General Motors, Ford, Zenith, and Converse,
continue to locate more and more of their production facilities in Third
World nations, and some, such as Nike (headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon),
produce virtually all of their products in Third World nations. In the
mid-2000s, U.S.-headquartered multinational firms and foreign affiliates
controlled by U.S. firms employed over twenty-two million workers, many of
them in Third World nations. 203
The transformation of the manufacturing sector by corporate globalization
strategies has accelerated the development of a postindustrial, service-based
economy—and hastened the drift toward class polarization. Over the past
thirty years, the proportion of U.S. workers engaged in manufacturing fell
from 33.1 percent in 1970 to a projected 8.2 percent in 2014. This decline has
been paralleled by a sharp increase in service-sector employment, rising from
62.5 percent of all workers in 1970 to a projected 78.5 percent in 2014. 204 The
service economy trend intensifies class divisions because of the corporate-generated,
two-tiered labor market that is especially evident in the service sector.
This system consists of firms utilizing a small group of high-paid “core” workers,
such as managers, professionals, computer programmers, and other information
analysts, and a very large group of moderate- to low-paid “peripheral”
workers, viewed as less central to organizational needs and goals.
The differences in pay and benefits for the two groups are closely linked to
differences in levels of skill and social capital. Variations in these resources
tend to reflect the prestige of the educational credentials workers possess, as
well as their social ties to organizational leaders (social capital). Thus, workers’
possession of these class-based capital resources influence their proximity
to corporate and organizational power and their access to the limited number
of well-paid positions. Peripheral workers occupy a spectrum of jobs ranging
from modestly paid occupations, such as teachers and police officers, to much
lower-paid positions, such as cashiers, guards, nursing aides, orderlies and attendants,
and janitors, which are projected to be among the occupations with
the largest job growth in the 2004–2014 period. 205 However, even modestly
paid service workers find themselves continuously subject to wage and benefit
pressures as private and public employers increase contingent-labor staffing
policies. 206 At the bottom, as we noted earlier, the lowest-paid service workers
are increasingly linked to large organizations through temporary agencies as
contract or contingent laborers. 207
With superclass interests as a dominant force in the national government,
significant features of the welfare state benefiting the new working class have