The Audacity of Hope: Blog 6

In chapter five Obama tells about two tours he took in very different companies. One was at Google in CA. He noticed as he went through it that many of the employees had graduated from prestigious, elite schools. This is a company that requires unique and highly developed skills such as engineers, lawyers, consultants, etc. For people with these kinds of skills the rewards in the global market place have never been better. The other tour was at the Maytag company where they had laid off 1,600 employees and were planning to shift the company to Mexico where the workers would make about a sixth of what they were making in the U.S.A. For the people at Maytag where the skill demands of the job can be quickly learned by low paid Mexican workers the result is tragic for these American workers. I think that we need to do a better job at making education a possibility to anyone that wants it. It also appears that jobs are being sent overseas to places like India when help on a certain product is needed. These jobs should be kept here so that there would be more employment opportunities for people in our country.
We are living in a global economy. I believe that globalization has brought a many benefits to us. For example, we don't have to pay high prices for some of the things we used to consider luxuries like big screen TVs. It keeps prices on many products lower than would be the case if all manufacturing were done in our country. Because people in other countries have jobs making products there is a market for some things produced in the USA.
But globalization has made for problems. Because many of the jobs sent to other countries were those that paid high wages in this country, it leaves many jobs in our country to be those that pay very low wages. This has made it very difficult if not impossible for a family on minimum wage to meet basic expenses. I think one remedy that may help some would be to raise the minimum wage but that still would probably not be enough. We need to invest more in educating the people who have lost their jobs. Obama says that over the last decade we have seen great economic growth but an anemic job growth. (146)