Globalization

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Globalization is being mismanaged: workers pay the costs while the benefits go to multinational corporations. The issue is not, however, about whether we should be part of a global economy, but about the rules that should govern that economy. Former EPI President Jeff Faux's Briefing Paper proposes a comprehensive strategy that includes policies to rebalance trade, to invest in new technologies that generate high-quality domestic manufacturing employment, and rules for the global economy that would benefit working people in both developed and developing countries.

Ron Hira argues that the vast expansion of the H-1B program passed by the U.S. Senate last year will, if signed into law, lead to more offshore outsourcing of jobs, displacement of American technology workers, decreased wages and job opportunities for those same workers, and the discouragement of young people from entering science and engineering fields. Mary Bauer exposes the systematic abuses guest workers experience in the United States.

Reports

Sustaining workers' bargaining power in an age of globalization: Institutions for the meaningful enforcement of international labor rights
by Mark Barenberg

Offsets and the lack of a comprehensive U.S. policy: What do other countries know that we don't?
by Owen E. Herrnstadt

Outsourcing America's technology and knowledge jobs
by Ron Hira

Getting Immigration Reform Right
by Ray Marshall

Globalization that works for working Americans
by Jeff Faux

Testimony

Globalization that works for working Americans, by Lawrence Mishel. Testimony given before the Committee on Ways and Means of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 30, 2007.

Event transcripts

March 28 event: Including presentations from Ray Marshall, Ron Hira, and Mary Bauer. Read transcript [PDF]

January 11 event: Includes Jeff Faux presentation on globalization. Read transcript.[PDF] 

Related research

Marketing of Economics History: A new EPI Issue Brief and a more-detailed Working Paper show that a couple of the numbers recently introduced into the never-ending trade debate—one on the purported measure of how much past trade agreements have added to the U.S. economy and the other on how much future agreements will add to American incomes—both derive from the same flawed study that was seemingly designed to promote the globalization status quo.

Globalization and American Wages: The continuing integration of the rich United States with a far poorer global economy has provoked much anxiety among American workers. EPI's Briefing Paper, Globalization and American Wages, makes clear that such anxiety is well-founded. In fact, contrary to popular rhetoric, conventional economic theory argues that American workers will indeed be harmed by this integration. This paper also provides empirical estimates of integration's effect on American wages and inequality, and uses some prominent forecasts about the future of service-sector offshoring to explore the possible wage implications of going further down this road.

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