Is ‘Jobs’ a 4-Letter Word for I-Way Planners?

It’s a small world, after all. So Vice President Al Gore has taken his enthusiasm about the (pick one) Information Superhighway, I-Way and Infobahn on the road and is now selling it overseas. Rebuilding America’s information infrastructure isn’t enough, asserts the Administration’s technology czar: This planet needs a new Global Information Infrastructure (GII).

“President Bill Clinton and I believe that the creation of a network of networks, transmitting messages and images at the speed of light across every continent, is essential to sustainable development for all the human family,” the vice president proclaims in a just-published op-ed piece for the Financial Times, one that echoes a speech he gave in Buenos Aires last March. “It will bring economic progress, strong democracies, better environmental management, improved health care and a greater sense of shared stewardship of our small planet.”

Gore’s GII Manifesto--which calls for technical collaboration between the industrialized nations and developing countries, as well as targeted loans for telecom network development--is filled with worthy sentiments and ideals. But the article was more remarkable for what it didn’t say. It was missing that vital four-letter word that most savvy politicians, including President Clinton, adore: J-O-B-S.

What kind of jobs will an investment in a GII create?

Jobs in Bangladesh and Brazil and Budapest, perhaps, but not jobs in Bakersfield, Boston and Birmingham. Peel away the romance and sentiment of the “It’s a small world, after all” vision of a GII and you have an infrastructure that’s better designed to export American white-collar jobs than American goods and services.

Information-intensive industries can be “hollowed out” just as quickly, just as easily and just as traumatically as their manufacturing brethren--particularly if the right infrastructure is in place.

Indeed, one can argue that the basic function of telecommunications networks has been to make distance irrelevant. To the extent a GII succeeds, we have succeeded in creating an infrastructure that facilitates the mass export of American jobs. And it’s not just the data-entry tasks that the intelligentsia dismiss as scut work. Rather, it’s the very knowledge-intensive jobs that allow white-collar workers to live lifestyles they feel they deserve.

What goes around comes around. Make no mistake: The GII will become a medium for bringing low-wage competition to America’s high-paid knowledge workers.

Silicon Valley may be the world’s largest producer of computer software but the second largest is Bangalore in India. Software engineers there--many superbly trained--do state-of-the-art programming for less than a quarter of Palo Alto-type pay. What happens to American wages and employment when a GII makes it a snap to bid out a software development project in Bangalore or Budapest?

A surgeon may have to be physically present to operate, but why wouldn’t a California HMO consider sending its X-Ray and CT Scan imagery overseas by satellite to a group of highly trained but comparatively cheaper group of radiologists who’ve decided to move to Barbados for the lifestyle? Why wouldn’t an aerospace firm outsource component design to engineers in China via the network?

Now, of course, this kind of intellectual outsourcing is happening anyway. Private enterprise has an economic incentive to invest in networks that enable outsourcing. Competitive global companies are looking to manage the cost of their knowledge work force just as ruthlessly as they sought to manage the labor cost of blue-collar workers.

But is it good public policy to try to accelerate this process through a GII initiative? It’s one thing to remove barriers to free trade; it’s quite another to accelerate the development of the infrastructure that facilitates the evaporation of good jobs before we have a better sense of what will take their place.

Is white-collar GII “shock therapy” the way for this economy to go? Or should we focus more on the NII before we go global?

To be sure, there should be no doubt that new infrastructures will create new jobs--including many better ones. But how many for how much? Will a GII create quality jobs faster than it exports them? A Gore spokesman says forecasts on these questions are in the works. However, America’s own experiences with technology in the workplace should make it clear that these new media sometimes annihilate as many white-collar jobs as they create.

Yes, we are a more productive nation, but that productivity is attained at a traumatic cost in employment. Is it in America’s best interest to accelerate the trend?

“The point here is that facilitated communications, like facilitated transportation, has always led to increased trade for everyone,” says a White House spokesman. “. . . We have to stay one step ahead of the competition because these things are happening regardless--now or five years from now--with or without a GII. We are looking at the problems.”

Actually, the point here is that promoting free trade and economic development around the world is a good thing. The problem--which our vice president has yet to explicitly address--is just what kind of standard-of-living costs the GII would create before America began to reap the benefits. To talk about global “economic development” without addressing the challenges posed to the American work force is disingenuous, a marriage of bad policy to bad politics.