The Corpuscle

"Institute for Fairness and Balance in the Global Workplace, Position Paper #23"

IFBGWP Position

Economic growth, quality control, widening employment opportunities and increasing consumer choice all depend on open markets worldwide and the free flow of both labor and capital across all borders. Local service sector jobs are, by their nature, immune to globalization and are therefore anticompetitive in the modern economic environment.

Background

In recent years, we have witnessed growing interest in something called "a living wage".

"Workers in some of Baltimore's homeless shelters and soup kitchens had noticed something new and troubling about many of the visitors coming in for meals and shelter: they happened to have full-time jobs. In response, local religious leaders successfully persuaded the City Council to raise the base pay for city contract workers to $6.10 an hour from $4.25, the federal minimum at the time. The Baltimore campaign was ostensibly about money. But to those who thought about it more deeply, it was about the force of particular moral propositions: first, that work should be rewarded, and second, that no one who works full time should have to live in poverty."

Waiting tables, plumbing pipes, driving delivery trucks, preparing fast food and other service sector employment opportunities suffer from excessive locality. Jobs that can't flow to ancillary labor markets encourage trade unionism, minimum wage laws, and other artificial barriers to investment and entrepreneurial innovation. The appearance of a "living wage movement" is merely the next logical step in this drift away from the economic promise of globalization.

Call To Legislative Action

Excessive locality is the problem and "The Freedom to Work From Anywhere Act of 2006" is the answer. The Act increases government funding for research into the tele-importation of commercial products and services heretofore limited to local physical realities. The goal of the Act is to offer workers everywhere the freedom to work without reference to restrictive and anticompetitive local labor markets. The IFBGWP envisions a day when you will be able to sit in a restaurant in New York City, place your order with a waiter physically located in Sierra Leone, have it prepared by a worker in Ulan Bator, and then have your meal tele-imported piping hot to your table.

We pledge to partner with the government to encourage development of exciting new technologies that will bring us closer to the day when true labor globalization will give workers everywhere the opportunity to participate in the global service sector economy.

The IFBGWP encourages all members to contact their Senators and Congresspersons to demand passage of H.R. 5639 and S.2315.