The increasing move of white-collar jobs overseas is inevitable, says one longtime Silicon Valley activist. So the fight for workers' rights has to go global. If your job has been offshored to another country, where someone else will do it for a fraction of your former salary, should you: (a) beg;
(b) rail against the prevailing trend;
(c) get a different, less vulnerable job? Amy Dean has a more radical, if wonkier, idea. Dean: "The obligation of the employee is to constantly keep skills upgraded and keep really current in whatever field that you work in. It also means that the social networks that you're a part of become increasingly important, because they become the vehicle that connects you to employment." Salon: What do you think that Silicon Valley will be like 20 years from now? Dean: "The economy will become increasingly hollow. ... There will be people who are working on the very top end of innovation, and there will be people servicing them, with very little in between." Decius: I have this ingrained distrust for unions. I used to be in one, until I found out that the money I was paying into it was being used to fuck me in Congress on Social Security. The majority of the people in said union were under the age of 30, but the union was primarily responsive to the interests of people over 50. What this amounted to was that I was "collectively bargaining" with a bunch of people who had no idea what the hell to bargain for, and let others worry about figuring that out. Apathy is its own reward. However, I strongly agree that our society needs to seriously revamp the social structures around the 40 hour work week. Our health insurance, our taxes, our pensions, our labor laws... basically everything typically handled by an HR department is structured around the idea that you work for one company and you do it for 40 hours a week. There is no room for flexibility, for employee or employer. I spent some time working for RHIC. I really like them. They are very professional. They do offer pensions and insurance for their consultants. They are a stab at the problem. But the legislation doesn't support their model. Insurance is only available if you are doing so much work with them that you pretty much look like a full timer on paper. Furthermore, they have a model which is so decentralized that it actually has a negative impact on geographic flexibility. They had no ability to transfer me to another office in an area where my skills were more in demand. Different RHIC city offices are totally autonomous. They are like different companies. I want more flexibility. My employer wants more flexibility. So whose holding up the show here? What's labor going to do about offshoring? | 
