1086 ★ CHAPTER 27 From Triumph to Tragedy
The outsourcing of jobs soon moved from manufacturing to other areas,
including accounting, legal services, banking, and other skilled jobs where
companies could employ workers overseas for a fraction of their cost in the
United States. All this lowered prices for consumers, but also threw millions of
American workers into competition with those around the globe, producing a
relentless downward pressure on American wages.
Overall, between 1990 and 2008, companies that did business in global markets
contributed almost nothing to job growth in the United States. Microsoft, symbol
of the new economy, employed only 30,000 people. Apple, another highly success-
ful company, whose computers, iPads, and iPhones were among the most ubiqui-
tous consumer products of the early twenty- first century, in 2010 employed some
43,000 persons in the United States (the large majority a low- wage sales force in
the company’s stores). Its contractors, who made these products, had more than
700,000 employees, almost all of them overseas. In 1970, General Motors had
been the country’s largest corporate employer. In the early twenty- first century, it
had been replaced by Wal- Mart, a giant discount retail chain that paid most of its
1.6 million workers slightly more than the minimum wage. Wal- Mart aggressively
opposed efforts at collective bargaining. Not a single one of its employees belonged
to a union. Thanks to NAFTA, which enabled American companies to expand their
business in Mexico, by 2010 Wal- Mart was also the largest employer in that country.
CULTURE WARS
The end of the Cold War ushered in hopes for a new era of global harmony.
Instead, what one observer called a “rebellion of particularisms”—renewed
emphasis on group identity and insistent demands for group recognition
and power— has racked the international arena. In the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, socialism and nationalism had united people of different
backgrounds in pursuit of common goals. Now, in Africa, Asia, the Middle
East, and parts of Europe, the waning of movements based on socialism and
the declining power of nation- states arising from globalization seemed to
unleash long- simmering ethnic and religious antagonisms. Partly in reac-
tion to the global spread of a secular culture based on consumption and mass
entertainment, intense religious movements attracted increasing numbers of
followers— Hindu nationalism in India, orthodox Judaism in Israel, Islamic
fundamentalism in much of the Muslim world, and evangelical Christianity
in the United States. Like other nations, although in a far less extreme way and
with little accompanying violence, the United States has experienced divisions
arising from the intensification of ethnic and racial identities and religious
fundamentalism.