The editorial pages of both The New York Times and The Washington Post carried important Labor Day articles on the need for more workforce training. Sam Leiken, a featured author in our NEIS book, published an op/ed in The New York Times on August 31. He contends that "If labor unions are to flourish in the 21st century…they will have to reach workers who no longer have long-term ties to one employer -- or even to a single industry. These new circumstances present unions with an opportunity to expand their membership. Today's workers need to continually improve their employability through better education and training, and unions are uniquely qualified to help."

The pace of the war on terrorism and ambivalence in US policy toward Iraq have given new running room to the anti-globalization movement, whose anti-American and Third Worldist rhetoric came to sound jarring in the immediate aftermath of September 11. Protesters from the groups that make up this loose coalition enjoyed wide publicity during the recent U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Demonstrations planned in Washington for this September's meetings of the World Bank and IMF appear to be attracting enough participants to stir security concerns in local government. Perhaps the globalization debate is about to resume.

If it does, there is a new resource that sensible people will find helpful: a policy paper issued last June by the British Trades Union Congress called Globalization: Myths and Realities.

Large and diverse organizations typically produce anodyne policy statements. Thankfully, this one takes up the issues in a straightforward way. Both the evangelists for globalization and its neo-Left opponents take some licks.

"Globalizers seem to believe that they have history on their side, that technology has changed everything, and that anybody concerned about the pace of change is a luddite incapable of engagement with twenty-first century reality," says the paper. It offers this delicious quote from Adair Turner, a former Director General of the Confederation of British Industry, no less, that could just as well have been written about the United States:

"Market fundamentalism appeals because it gives to its true believers that absolute certainty that so many intellectuals who should have known better derived from Marxism between the 1920s and 1970s. A notable feature of meetings at Britain's more right-wing think tanks, or of debates on European issues with representatives of the ultra-liberal [ed. note -- pro-free trade] right, is the presence of young men in particular who seem to glow with the absolute conviction one saw on the faces of Marxist students in the 1960s and 70s."

The critique of the anti-globalization Left is no less pointed: " ' [G]lobalized resistance' outside the democratic structures of developed countries -- supposedly because the institutions have been captured by the agents of capital -- is a fundamentally anti-democratic delusion."

The TUC paper challenges a number of what it calls the myhs of globalization:

• "The world economy was more global in the 1870-1914 period than it is today."
• "There is no evidence to suggest that there has been a decline in real wages in the developed world -- quite the reverse in fact."
• "[T]he poorest countries in the world are staying poor partly because they have inadequate access to the world trading system…."
• "…80 per cent of the fall in industrial employment in the advanced economies between 1964 and 1994 can be explained by internal factors [ed. note -- new technologies and processes] and only 20 per cent by competition from low wage economies."
• Inequalities in education and skills within the developed world may be a greater cause of wage inequalities than pressure from low-wage labor markets abroad.