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The Future of Work? Globalisation, we are told by the conservatives, is good for America. Why? On the one hand it lowers the price of goods, on the other it is good for the overall economy because it frees up labor resources to do higher value work. A nice theory, but one with significant flaws. First off, an underlying assumption is that not only will there necessarily be higher-value work to be done, but that Americans will be uniquely suited to do that work. Secondly, there has not yet been any serious discussion of the future of people who are not capable of attaining higher-value skills. Given that the most significant driving force in creation of higher-paying jobs has been technology, the long-standing US neglect of science education makes it increasingly unlikely that new high-tech work will be done by Americans. Throw in the current administration's hostility to science, along with its pandering to anti-intellectual reactionaries, and we have an impending crisis. Today many of the finest technology schools in the world are in India. At the same time American science education has been mediocre for years. We are already seeing a small shift of computer jobs overseas. There is no reason to believe that new biotech or nanotech jobs will be located in America for any significant time, if at all, before moving overseas as well. The absence of serious discussion about this issue reflects classic American hubris. As a people we are staring into the maw of loss of economic primacy, and we close our eyes and dream that we will always be on top. Another significant issue which seems to have completely dropped out of the public discourse is that of defining the societal role of people whose labor is deemed by the free market as not being worth enough to allow them to live off it. The conservative line is that these people should somehow magically transform themselves into people whose labor is worth more, yet they also want to cut funding for education and job training. And of course this glosses over the possibility that perhaps some people are only capable of doing work which the market says is not worthy of high pay. This is symptomatic of our shift in public policy away from concern for actual citizens and towards pandering to the needs of large corporations. As a country it is essential that we confront the false belief that corporate America has any interest in the health of American society. The goal of a corporation is to make money, not aid society, as we are so often reminded by conservatives. If we do not have strong governmental involvement in looking to the needs of society we will end up looking like third-world countries much faster than they will start looking like us.