Posted: Tuesday, 19 June 2007

The restructuring of labour markets internationally

While there is considerable discussion about the increasingly apparent effects of international trade and investment liberalization - for example, on the manufacturing sectors of various countries - much less is said about the restructuring of labour markets on a global scale. Trends in two sectors - the knowledge sector and health care - exemplify some key changes which are unfolding in a variety of sectors of various countries in terms of cross-border flows of ‘work’ and workers, national training policy, training delivery, and occupational categories.

The Knowledge Sector:

•  Employers are increasingly looking for workers with a mixture of skills and attitudes which do not fall neatly into familiar occupational categories but can be combined and re-combined according to the changing needs of employers, for example: ‘e-skills’, digital literacy in standardized global software packages, entrepreneurship, and the ‘qualities’ of a ‘good team player’.
• As high-capacity telecommunications infrastructure is being put in place - mainly by states and financed by taxpayers - pieces of work are being passed along from worker to worker, across borders, depending on the particular combinations of skills needed to complete specific projects.
• Within this process of “global sourcing”, given the historic structure of inequality in the world economy, there is a growing hierarchy of knowledge workers based in different parts of the world.
• Knowledge workers in countries of the Middle East, Eastern and Central Europe are now falling into the hierarchy under the already-established, off-shoring countries of India, the Philippines and Barbados (in the English-speaking category), Tunisia, Morocco and Martinique (in the French-speaking category), and the Dominican Republic and Colombia (in the Spanish-speaking category).

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