Educational Media Reviews Online

With the onset of globalization, this documentary examines the shrinking need for semi-skilled labor. The film contains input (with subtitles) from a wide variety of perspectives including those of migrant workers, impoverished Mexican factory workers, French middle class youth, chief executives, and economists.

In 1980, United States Steel Corporation employed 120,000 workers. By 2001, USS employed about 21,000 workers who produced more than the 120,000 did in 1980. Good news for USS; bad news for 100,000 workers. The film goes on to explain that the need for semi-skilled labor is continuing to decrease. Even manufacturing labor, which has been “outsourced” to Mexico from the U.S., must now compete with China and Haiti, which offer even cheaper labor. One economist foresees work as becoming “nomadic.” In unstable economies, people will need to move to the places jobs exist.

The move to efficiency and global outsourcing of labor has lead to a rapid erosion of middle class labor and, therefore, the middle class lifestyle. One economist points out that the cheapest worker will be more expensive and less efficient than a technological innovation. With the growing global population, the practical extension of this pattern is 3 billion of the 9 billion projected people in the world in 2050 will be unemployed.

This is a superb piece of work that gives a thorough assessment of globalization in the context of supply and demand for labor. Rarely does a documentary less than an hour in length give such a full, practical and theoretical treatment of a complex subject as this film has. The arguments and evidence presented by speakers are taken to the next progressive step by each following speaker. The film progresses in a logical fashion.

Its breadth of treatment of this timely topic earns it top marks.