BUT MACHINES AREN'T COLORED:

On Misdirected Workplace Worry: What's a bigger employment threat, outsourcing or improved technology? (RICK CAREW, 12/23/08, Wall Street Journal)

Worried about your job being sent to China? If so, then you'll never see the bigger threats lurking on the other side of the cubicle wall. Advances in technology and budget cuts by management are much more of a menace to your future employment than some two-bucks-an-hour worker in a southern China boomtown. At least that's the message of Columbia Business School professor Bruce Greenwald and historian Judd Kahn in "Globalization," their bracing response to the "irrational fear" of outsourcing and other bogeymen of the antiglobalization brigades.

Messrs. Greenwald and Kahn argue that the key forces shaping our lives are local; it's not that international trade is unimportant, it's just that other factors are more important. Consider the significance of technology in the workplace, something often overlooked by globalization worrywarts. Examining data on changes in the U.S. work force, the authors show that job losses due to higher productivity -- often the result of improving technology -- greatly outnumber those lost to globalization. The authors cite Commerce Department figures estimating that 65% of job losses in manufacturing between 2000 and 2006 were due to productivity increases; just 35% of job losses owed to overseas outsourcing. "The data actually reveal that fears about the havoc from globalization on workers in high-wage economies have been wildly overblown," Messrs. Greenwald and Kahn report. Think of the legions of secretaries and office workers eliminated by the desktop computer or the increasing use of technology in the auto industry.