Final Exam: Globalism's True Impact

Written in class as a final exam.  Last few paragraphs are less developed because I was running out of time.


The privileges and products of economic globalization saturate everyday American life.  From automobiles to underwear, bananas to backpacks, nearly everything most Americans purchase, use, or consume owes at least a part of its production to foreign labor or other international manufacturing processes.  This pervasiveness can make it easy to take globalism for granted as a benign or at least neutral process with a relatively positive outcome.  As authors Corey Mattson, Meredith Throop, and Barbara Ehrenreich show, however, globalization often enriches the few--businesspeople and transnational corporations--at the expense of many disadvantaged or disenfranchised workers and innocent bystanders in nations exploited by globalism.  Only by addressing the inequities exposed or exacerbated by globalism can citizens of the world help to create a more just and less harmful global economic paradigm.

When considering the injustices and inequities often produced by globalism, one often thinks of sweatshops, which Corey Mattson quotes Sweatshop Watch as defined as "a subcontracting system in which the middleman earned profits from the margin between the amount they received for a contract and the amount they paid to the workers" (481).  That margin, Sweatshop Watch explains, is said to be "'sweated' from the workers because they received minimal wages for excessive hours worked under unsanitary conditions" (Mattson 481).  Mattson discusses one nation's sweatshops in particular:  the maquilas of Guatemala.  Thanks to the cheap labor U.S. foreign assistance and the Guatemalan government allow workers to provide, in large part to U.S. and Asian apparel manufacturers, "the maquila has been the birth of a new working class in Guatemala" (Mattson 484).  The employment of "tens of thousands of workers" (Mattson 484) would appear to be beneficial.  When one considers that the minimum wage in Guatemala as of August 2004 was "U.S. $4.95 per day" (Mattson 484), however, paid mostly to impoverished women--according to Mattson, "approximately 80% of maquila workers are women" (484), this employment becomes less clearly beneficial. Mattson's description of maquila working conditions, moreover, paints an alarming picture:

Unventilated workrooms, unsafe workshops, verbal abuse, sexual harassment and abuse, firings for pregnancy, arbitrary dismissals and forced overtime are just some of the issues workers face in Guatemalan maquilas...Bathroom access is restricted causing kidney infections...Respiratory problems are common due to poor ventilation...It is not uncommon to work 70 to 80 hour weeks in the maquila.  This increases the number of industrial accidents and causes repetitive motion injuries.  (Mattson 484-85)

Maquila conditions, and the extremely low compensation paid to workers enduring those conditions, fail to fulfill the dream of prosperity that proponents of globalization promise.

Globalization, however, doesn't only affect workers.  A continent away from Guatemala, in South Africa, black South African women unconnected to sweatshops or transnational manufacturers suffer another consequence of economic globalization.  In South Africa, the International Monetary Fund and the Workd Bank, according to Meredith Throop, have "aggressively pursued the privatization of water" (511) as part of a "capitalist, free-market economic model" (510) in which citizens are forced to pay for formerly publicly provided necessities such as water.  As Throop explains, "women have, through their traditional roles...been disproportionately impacted" (510).  Throop elaborates:

Every day women and girls walk long distances to fetch water for their families, often at the expense of education, income-generating activities, cultural and political involvement, and rest and recreation...As accessibility to water deteriorates, poor women's livelihoods and thus the livelihoods of entire families become increasingly vulnerable.  (Throop 510)

The price hikes on water often force South African women to supply their families' water from "polluted rivers, streams, and open pits [leading to the spread of] cholera" (Throop 512), whose incidence quintupled in some regions after the privatization of water (Throop 513).  In addition, "inadequate water and sanitation service exacerbates the condition of people suffering from immune deficiencies such as HIV/AIDS" (Throop 513).  South Africa's example clearly illustrates the failure of globalization's capitalist ideology to provide for the well-being of large numbers of people.

Finally, beyond the physical costs, globalization can exact an emotional and psychological toll.  In "Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy," Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell tell the story of Josephine, a Sri Lankan woman who left her own children behind to care for another family's child in Greece. Josephine's work has brought her family a measure of prosperity, but her two youngest children "have shown signs of real distress" (Ehrenreich 531), with one "attempting suicide three times" (Ehrenreich 531).  "Increasingly often," Ehrenreich writes, "as affluent and middle-class families in the First World come to depend on migrants from poorer regions to provide child care [and] homemaking, a global relationship arises that in some ways mirrors the traditional relationship between the sexes" (538).  In that relationship, "poor countries take on a role like that of the traditional woman...patient, nurturing, and self-denying" (Ehrenreich 538), often at the cost of her own family's emotional and psychological stability.

An examination of these examples makes clear the fact that globalization's effects extend much further than the merely economic.  Capitalism and the search for cheap labor have created and exacerbated startling and often devastating inequities all over the world.  As consumers, we should feel obligated to keep these inequities in mind, and make our purchasing and consumption decisions based not only on price and convenience, but also on what practices our purchases may encourage in the world.  We must also be aware of the global effects of our national ideologies, and know that our votes and politics also affect others around the world.  Only by being aware of the impact we make can we act as truly responsible global citizens.


*All quotes are from Beyond Borders:  Thinking Critically About Global Issues, edited by Paula S. Rothenberg.