9781422282861

C H A P T E R 1 A Global Economy

T he refrigerator sits at the Galesburg Antiques Mall in downtown Galesburg, Illinois, collecting dust and stares from customers. It’s a nondescript appliance— a white Maytag with the freezer on top. Millions just like it have been sold, and most, one would suspect, are still being used in kitchens around the world. Yet this refrigerator is different from all the others. In September 2004, the Maytag factory here—where this refrigerator was made—closed and moved its opera- tion to Mexico. The fridge was the last one assembled in this city of 32,000. As the appliance made its way down the assembly line, employees took a black marker and signed their names to it. A few months after the shuttering, Barack Obama, then running for the U.S. Senate, blamed globalization for the plant’s demise and the loss of 1,600 jobs. Galesburg, once an example of the promise of globalization, had become a reminder that globalization can go horribly wrong. But across the globe, by the time the Maytag plant closed in Galesburg, a massive Taiwan-based manufacturing company, Foxconn, had opened a new factory in Taiyuan, in the Shanxi Province of mainland China. Foxconn would come to expand into several countries, including Brazil and Japan, and would play a major role in producing parts for Apple’s iPhone and other consumer electronics. Despite nagging controversies surrounding its treatment of workers, Foxconn and other manufacturers in China have been re- sponsible for lifting huge numbers of Chinese peasants out of poverty and into the middle class. Given the trade-offs involved in globalization, it’s not surprising that support for opening economic borders is qualified, to say the least. Néstor Kirchner, president of Argentina from 2003 to 2007, understood the impact that the bipolarization of globalization can have on people. “We must create a kind of globalization that works for everyone . . . not just for a few,” he once said.

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CHAPTER 1