Monday, March 14, 2005
Import Workers or Export Jobs?
Like it or not, this question is going to shape the world that we will leave to our children.
But we won’t find the answer if we keep hiding in the cocoon of our reassuring cultural habits and systems.It is about time we think Globalisation with global values. Since these “G” words started creeping everywhere, we have hardly heard anything else than expressions of euro-centrism or extrapolations of economic theories, too far from the basic human realities which rule most aspects of our works, salaries and travels.
If we hope to understand and eventually manage multiculturalism, we have to find shared values which can bind the future working teams. Obviously they will flow less from, let’s say, the Oxbridge schools of thoughts, the Indian cast system, or the neo-Confucian socio-economics, than from more fundamental concepts like wealth, comfort, pride, play or entrepreneurial enthusiasm.
First, if we want multiculturalism, we should start with the basic humility of feeling exactly what we are: a drop in the ocean of human life. One perception, one opinion, one desire, out of about 10 billions. Hence, we have to learn to express only personal opinions, avoiding as much as possible any attempt to sound masterly universal. And no economists slang, please. How can we team with the universal crowd if we wave our vocabulary as a club tie? Sometimes it seems that once economists have reached their PhD, they have already left our world and entered a dreamland of graphs and theories. They do not seem to realize that the semantics of their acquired language are trapping their thoughts inside the words and the thinking system which structures their brains.
For many years I have been asking my economist friends to give me the references of some books where I can read, and understand, the basics of human economics. I am not at all interested in hedge funds which for me belong to the gambling world, I’m not concerned with monetarism, and hardly attentive to the crude balance of supply & offer. In my world of rural development (hey! this is ‘Economy’ for 80 % of the world population!), what I keep trying to understand is “where is the wealth coming from? how can we enhance the process? how can we share it better?”.
I got no answer and I decided to go and look by myself: work, observe and think. During 35 years, in more than 62 countries, it has often been mind blowing. I am no early Christian “Desert Father” in the Sinaï, even if my wife and I spent 12 years on a mudflat with our doorsteps into the Red Sea waters of Saudi Arabia. The job was called “sustainable shrimp farming” and it gave plenty of opportunities to observe. You don’t train 350 persons of 13 nationalities into environmentally clean and highly profitable business without learning something about people’s motivation and, so, about what makes wealth!
Before we start thinking about where to manufacture and with whom, we have to come down, at least temporarily, to more basic fundamentals than we are used to in economy.
As did Jeffrey Sachs, the special advisor to Kofi Annan, who recently clarified the issue of African developing countries. He decided to put aside the usual IMF and World Bank approaches, just the time he needed for calculating some simple things as “how much would it cost?”. Now we know: it would only cost about US$ 100 per inhabitant per year, during 10 years, to bring six African countries, selected because they enjoy fairly democratic governments, to the levels of infrastructures, health and education needed for real development to start.
Also as did Françoise Falaise, a senior nutritionist recently challenged by food security and infant malnutrition problems in the Congo. She spent three months just observing and calculating the cost of the family food basket and the day-to-day productivity of the local farms. The result: balanced nutrition is easily reachable by every family in Congo if they cultivate a real variety of species on 1 acre of land (for 6 persons) and keep some pigeons or guinea pigs for a supplement of animal proteins. Plot size and work load involved need to be no larger than usual in the region. Now we know: we should stop food distribution aid and devote our efforts to teaching programmed cultivation of varied species. More results, more dignity for all.
In both cases, Sachs and Falaise did not exercise any economical theory: just bank account management on one side, looking into the family wallet on the other.
Most of the basic parameters that we should come back to, from time to time, in order to get our minds set on the right priorities and the real orders of magnitude, are usually related to the elementary human needs we all share: comfort, pleasure, competition, playful social interactions, love and family.
We often read economists who fret about 2% difference in annual growth ratio. That is “growth of the growth”! It is sometimes interesting to get the calculator and check what difference in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) they are actually speaking about. But we all know, from direct experience, that the performance of workers in an office or on a building yard can suddenly grow by 200%, just thanks to renewed motivation, good team spirit, clear objectives, shared awareness of the program and its priorities. All elements which do not enter well into graphs nor theories. All factors which you do not manage from a computer but directly from the workplace.
Once we accept to give a chance to these more human factors and indicators of economical performance, we can think about our work force with less hang-ups and more freedom towards our sacrosanct habits and concepts.
Let us go back to Saudi Arabia for a moment, and not only to be provocative. Saudi Arabia is the biggest unashamed importer of manpower in the world. Some have seen it as an historical tradition, rooted in the spirit of their slaves trading forefathers. The equation is much simpler: they need skills, they need work force, they enjoy laziness (as any reasonable human being should), and they are not attracted to menial work. So… who wants the job?
They get people from all over the world, Americans and Europeans as well as citizens from Asia and Africa. It is not said here that everything is always fair in these contracts nor in the way that some immigrant workers, mainly the less educated, are treated by their Saudi employers. But these excesses, most often the fact of the middlemen recruiting the employees in their own countries, are not an essential part of the economic logic. They can be fixed.
This logic, for the largest part of the foreigners working in Saudi Arabia, is fairly simple. At the origin there is a strong difference in wealth: Arabia is rich, these workers are not. Rules are clear: the foreigners will always be foreigners and have no say in the ruling of the host country. They are expected to obey local rules and traditions, at least in public. They are only there to sell their skills and their work for a price which is usually somewhere between 10 and 40 times what they would have been hired for in their own country, if, by chance, any job was available there.You want, you get. You have enough, you return home. And all your gains are NET. No tax, no surprise as long as you do not get involved in illegal activities. What freer enterprise?
The largest part of the foreigners working in Arabia have the same motivation: they want to install their family decently and most of them have ‘a project’, often a small business that they want to make a success of. All are dreaming, many will fail. But as we like to say and to believe, every human being is equal in dignity and should have equal chances. It is an important part of dignity to be free to engage in a personal enterprise and to be given the chance to try.
On the other hand, companies in our industrialized countries have developed technologies and markets but many are now reaching a cul-de-sac. If they want to survive stiff world competition, they need wider market territories or lower production costs. Today many choose to lower their costs by delocalisation. They do export jobs. But if you see the equation in terms of human motivation, pleasure and dignity, it is probable that this solution will entail two negative consequences: (a) decadence in Europe & USA where the economy could artificially survive but without the blood of life: business enjoyment, risk and adventure, all exported to the host countries; and (b) frustration in the host countries where a social elite builds up an industrial feudalism based on values that the largest majority of people is not ready, yet, to recognise nor to adopt.
Then, should we import workers ? The work, stupid, not the workers! We should import working forces, on a temporary basis, inside the limits of a clear and fair contract.
At the light of the Saudi experience and further research on basic concepts of economics, human needs and dignity, a mature democracy should be able to draw a system strict enough to avoid unwelcome parasitic immigration but fair enough to allow honest workers to build up the capital they need to develop their own country in the frame of the creativity and values of their own culture.
One expects hot debate about such a touchy issue. Maybe this is just like so many others things in our world at the start of the 21st century: we have to decide if we are feeling tired or if human History is just starting.
If we choose to be tired , this is ‘the end of History’, let us drug on consumerism for some more years, and then… “après nous les mouches!”.
If we opt for the beginning of History, maybe soon all human beings will have food, clothes, health protection and proper education. Then, humanity can finally start something else, something new, something properly human: reduce the old animal power struggle and start creating together, inventing together, enjoying life together.
Then, let us all mix in a world without frontiers: import work, import workers, import managers, import entrepreneurs, import clowns!
“Et que la fête commence!”
© Louis Boël – February 2005
But we won’t find the answer if we keep hiding in the cocoon of our reassuring cultural habits and systems.It is about time we think Globalisation with global values. Since these “G” words started creeping everywhere, we have hardly heard anything else than expressions of euro-centrism or extrapolations of economic theories, too far from the basic human realities which rule most aspects of our works, salaries and travels.
If we hope to understand and eventually manage multiculturalism, we have to find shared values which can bind the future working teams. Obviously they will flow less from, let’s say, the Oxbridge schools of thoughts, the Indian cast system, or the neo-Confucian socio-economics, than from more fundamental concepts like wealth, comfort, pride, play or entrepreneurial enthusiasm.
First, if we want multiculturalism, we should start with the basic humility of feeling exactly what we are: a drop in the ocean of human life. One perception, one opinion, one desire, out of about 10 billions. Hence, we have to learn to express only personal opinions, avoiding as much as possible any attempt to sound masterly universal. And no economists slang, please. How can we team with the universal crowd if we wave our vocabulary as a club tie? Sometimes it seems that once economists have reached their PhD, they have already left our world and entered a dreamland of graphs and theories. They do not seem to realize that the semantics of their acquired language are trapping their thoughts inside the words and the thinking system which structures their brains.
For many years I have been asking my economist friends to give me the references of some books where I can read, and understand, the basics of human economics. I am not at all interested in hedge funds which for me belong to the gambling world, I’m not concerned with monetarism, and hardly attentive to the crude balance of supply & offer. In my world of rural development (hey! this is ‘Economy’ for 80 % of the world population!), what I keep trying to understand is “where is the wealth coming from? how can we enhance the process? how can we share it better?”.
I got no answer and I decided to go and look by myself: work, observe and think. During 35 years, in more than 62 countries, it has often been mind blowing. I am no early Christian “Desert Father” in the Sinaï, even if my wife and I spent 12 years on a mudflat with our doorsteps into the Red Sea waters of Saudi Arabia. The job was called “sustainable shrimp farming” and it gave plenty of opportunities to observe. You don’t train 350 persons of 13 nationalities into environmentally clean and highly profitable business without learning something about people’s motivation and, so, about what makes wealth!
Before we start thinking about where to manufacture and with whom, we have to come down, at least temporarily, to more basic fundamentals than we are used to in economy.
As did Jeffrey Sachs, the special advisor to Kofi Annan, who recently clarified the issue of African developing countries. He decided to put aside the usual IMF and World Bank approaches, just the time he needed for calculating some simple things as “how much would it cost?”. Now we know: it would only cost about US$ 100 per inhabitant per year, during 10 years, to bring six African countries, selected because they enjoy fairly democratic governments, to the levels of infrastructures, health and education needed for real development to start.
Also as did Françoise Falaise, a senior nutritionist recently challenged by food security and infant malnutrition problems in the Congo. She spent three months just observing and calculating the cost of the family food basket and the day-to-day productivity of the local farms. The result: balanced nutrition is easily reachable by every family in Congo if they cultivate a real variety of species on 1 acre of land (for 6 persons) and keep some pigeons or guinea pigs for a supplement of animal proteins. Plot size and work load involved need to be no larger than usual in the region. Now we know: we should stop food distribution aid and devote our efforts to teaching programmed cultivation of varied species. More results, more dignity for all.
In both cases, Sachs and Falaise did not exercise any economical theory: just bank account management on one side, looking into the family wallet on the other.
Most of the basic parameters that we should come back to, from time to time, in order to get our minds set on the right priorities and the real orders of magnitude, are usually related to the elementary human needs we all share: comfort, pleasure, competition, playful social interactions, love and family.
We often read economists who fret about 2% difference in annual growth ratio. That is “growth of the growth”! It is sometimes interesting to get the calculator and check what difference in GDP (Gross Domestic Product) they are actually speaking about. But we all know, from direct experience, that the performance of workers in an office or on a building yard can suddenly grow by 200%, just thanks to renewed motivation, good team spirit, clear objectives, shared awareness of the program and its priorities. All elements which do not enter well into graphs nor theories. All factors which you do not manage from a computer but directly from the workplace.
Once we accept to give a chance to these more human factors and indicators of economical performance, we can think about our work force with less hang-ups and more freedom towards our sacrosanct habits and concepts.
Let us go back to Saudi Arabia for a moment, and not only to be provocative. Saudi Arabia is the biggest unashamed importer of manpower in the world. Some have seen it as an historical tradition, rooted in the spirit of their slaves trading forefathers. The equation is much simpler: they need skills, they need work force, they enjoy laziness (as any reasonable human being should), and they are not attracted to menial work. So… who wants the job?
They get people from all over the world, Americans and Europeans as well as citizens from Asia and Africa. It is not said here that everything is always fair in these contracts nor in the way that some immigrant workers, mainly the less educated, are treated by their Saudi employers. But these excesses, most often the fact of the middlemen recruiting the employees in their own countries, are not an essential part of the economic logic. They can be fixed.
This logic, for the largest part of the foreigners working in Saudi Arabia, is fairly simple. At the origin there is a strong difference in wealth: Arabia is rich, these workers are not. Rules are clear: the foreigners will always be foreigners and have no say in the ruling of the host country. They are expected to obey local rules and traditions, at least in public. They are only there to sell their skills and their work for a price which is usually somewhere between 10 and 40 times what they would have been hired for in their own country, if, by chance, any job was available there.You want, you get. You have enough, you return home. And all your gains are NET. No tax, no surprise as long as you do not get involved in illegal activities. What freer enterprise?
The largest part of the foreigners working in Arabia have the same motivation: they want to install their family decently and most of them have ‘a project’, often a small business that they want to make a success of. All are dreaming, many will fail. But as we like to say and to believe, every human being is equal in dignity and should have equal chances. It is an important part of dignity to be free to engage in a personal enterprise and to be given the chance to try.
On the other hand, companies in our industrialized countries have developed technologies and markets but many are now reaching a cul-de-sac. If they want to survive stiff world competition, they need wider market territories or lower production costs. Today many choose to lower their costs by delocalisation. They do export jobs. But if you see the equation in terms of human motivation, pleasure and dignity, it is probable that this solution will entail two negative consequences: (a) decadence in Europe & USA where the economy could artificially survive but without the blood of life: business enjoyment, risk and adventure, all exported to the host countries; and (b) frustration in the host countries where a social elite builds up an industrial feudalism based on values that the largest majority of people is not ready, yet, to recognise nor to adopt.
Then, should we import workers ? The work, stupid, not the workers! We should import working forces, on a temporary basis, inside the limits of a clear and fair contract.
At the light of the Saudi experience and further research on basic concepts of economics, human needs and dignity, a mature democracy should be able to draw a system strict enough to avoid unwelcome parasitic immigration but fair enough to allow honest workers to build up the capital they need to develop their own country in the frame of the creativity and values of their own culture.
One expects hot debate about such a touchy issue. Maybe this is just like so many others things in our world at the start of the 21st century: we have to decide if we are feeling tired or if human History is just starting.
If we choose to be tired , this is ‘the end of History’, let us drug on consumerism for some more years, and then… “après nous les mouches!”.
If we opt for the beginning of History, maybe soon all human beings will have food, clothes, health protection and proper education. Then, humanity can finally start something else, something new, something properly human: reduce the old animal power struggle and start creating together, inventing together, enjoying life together.
Then, let us all mix in a world without frontiers: import work, import workers, import managers, import entrepreneurs, import clowns!
“Et que la fête commence!”
© Louis Boël – February 2005
