Globalization and Its Impact on Work and Employment

Question: Research and critically discuss the impact of globalisation on work and employment. Answer: Introduction Globalization is an important concept, which explains that how the economy of a country gets influenced by the global economical change and how each country is making new policy and implementing those policies to develop in the international trade. Industries and markets are exposed to new markets where each market varies from one society to another. The global network of business and trading has brought the small, medium and large scale industries together (Bertho, Crawford and Fogarty, 2008). This has removed geographical and social barriers and covered the broader range of activities of the technological, social and cultural areas. Globalization has simply changed the face of world economy and affected the products people consume. Over the past two centuries, countries have become integrated under one single big economy where small and domestic industries are getting easy scope to trade their products to the global customer (Boudreaux, 2008). Thus, globalization has helped improve the financial condition of the world as a whole, and brought huge improvements. With globalization, new doors have opened to the industrial sector; it helps in increasing the employment structure. New markets are born all over the world based on the products produced by various industries as per the demand of the consumer, which in turn increases the scope of the customers to choose from various foreign goods as per their requirements (Business.mapsofindia.com, 2015). Thus, to get their customers attention companies are adopting new marketing and advertising strategies. Even the government of the countries is relaxing their foreign trade policies to encourage inflow of foreign currencies into the country. With relaxed free trade policies, there is decrease in the transportation cost and capital control. So with low tariffs more companies are willing to invest in the foreign markets. This helps in having a better foreign trade relations and building a single and inter connected inte rnational economy. It is more developed with the rise in the use of communication between the countries. People from any corner of the world can avail any information on anything through internet. People can avail anything of their choice from anywhere in the world, like for example, buying of seasonal foods is not limited anymore to a particular season. Globalization has helped in ensuring optimum utilization of resources, everyone is getting aware about the limited resources available from the environment so social norms are followed to control any wastage. With globalization the employment conditions are increasing, especially in the developing countries (Hagen and Halvorsen, 2009). Developing countries are showing great scope for foreign companies. Foreign companies are exploring countries with huge market prospect, good outsourcing and lesser salary structure. Also, on the part of the developing countries like India, they are enjoying the benefits of globalization ,like the standard of living of the people have improved, more work is generated and more foreign investment is entering the economy. The industry which India witnessed a huge change is the call centre off shoring industries (Hamilton and Wood, 2009). As compared to a developed country like UK, India provides a huge source of workforce which has made big and well-known company to explore this market and thus several prominent companies are exploring the Indian economy. The call centre services is different from the others service industry. It focuses on the objectives of having the need to be cost efficient and require being customer oriented. Thus to maintain the capital and earn profit the cost sho uld be controlled and also the customer interest should be kept in mind (Haugen and Mach, 2010). The company place importance on quality of the service, to satisfy and retain the customers who bring high value. When this industry comes into a developing country they bring lots of opportunities and India with its skilled human resource make use of this opportunities, to make a mark in the global telecommunication industry. Even though the call centre industry is flourishing, they are still unable to provide job satisfaction and maintain their employees due to lack of long term prospects. Sometimes, the employee for the call centre job is over qualified for his post this make the employee uncertain about his job, but working in the telecommunication industry makes them while performing the job they learn a variety of skills needed to communicate with the clients of the company (Lee and Eyraud, 2008). But there is not much scope of gaining any new knowledge because the employee does sa me kind of work every day. Some of the problems observed in the call centre industry are the odd working hours, because in this industry the operations are mainly conducted for the foreign customers. As this operations take place in the evening or night. This affects the physical and mental well being of the employees (Stewart, 2011). The high night time work pressure along with long travelling takes a toll on the employees health and social life. Secondly, half the workforce in these companies constitutes of women whose family commitments and private life is affected the most because of the stress of performing in the varied work timings and transport problems. Thirdly, the work environment lack of nature with closed glass buildings and artificial control of temperature and humidity do affect the employees health which may give rise to work leave or under performance. Fourth, the work pressure is high in these companies but unlike the banking and telecom industry they do not get to voice their issues due to a bsence of employee unions. Fifth, the India employees feel the pressure of performing because of the difference in their language from their western customers, because the accent and pronunciation has to be correct to maintain the customers (Merino, 2010). Thus, the management is trying to bring solution to all this problems faced by the employees. They exercise an effective recruitment and selection process and also the selected candidates are provided proper training to work under pressure and also to adapt the dialect to converse with their customers. Also, employees are provided with transport facilities to ensure their comfort and also the work environment is improved thus more women are encouraged to work here. Although several measures are taken to encourage employees, call centre industry is not considered to be a full life career option (Miller, 2007). We can understand the employment structure experienced by the people working outside India and the discrimination faced by the Indians with the discussion of health industry in UK. The comparison between the UK based doctors and doctors qualified from outside UK will help understand it better. The Staff and Associate Specialist group in UK consists of the major proportion of doctors qualified from outside UK. But overseas qualified doctors who qualified from countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka face discrimination in their job, often they have to wait longer to get any promotion and sometimes even end up working in lower posts. Even if they have same qualification and experience as per the UK based doctors, they are not given proper chance for promotion and sometimes applying for a higher post multiple times yield no result. So though globalization made a huge impact on employment like developing countries like India is experiencing huge job growth but firms in de veloped countries like UK and US experiencing a fall in employment specially in the tradable product markets (Powell and Ghauri, 2008). Conclusion Thus we can say that globalization has changed the global economy and created more employment. Participation of foreign countries developed the economy and brought stability. Globalization leads to better competition and innovation in product manufacturing and marketing and for that certain flexibility on the part of the firm which is internal flexibility and global labor markets which is external flexibility is required (OilPrice.com, 2015). The firm which uses its own resources to start a new process is called in sourcing which brings more flexibility, more control and better performance. In sourcing is used to avoid the difference between skill and expertise and global economic condition and develops the employment condition with training and promotion which improves the standard. In sourcing is used in countries like UK where three fourth of the qualified doctors are from countries like India and Pakistan, though they experience a low working condition. In sourcing is expensive t han out sourcing (Small Business - Chron.com, 2015). Out sourcing is when the organization seeks services of another organization to complete a process. It can be off shored or done in the same country with control. Out sourcing helps in controlling costs, save time, maximize profit and gain better foothold in the market. Like foreign outsourcing companies are coming into the developing countries and carry their operation which helps them in lowering cost and getting workforce at lower pay structure. Thus, we can conclude that globalization has opened new ways to each and every company and improved the level of work and employment in a developing country like India (Torp, 2014). References Bertho, M., Crawford, B. and Fogarty, E. (2008).The impact of globalization on the United States. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. Boudreaux, D. (2008).Globalization. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. Business.mapsofindia.com, (2015).Benefits of Globalization. [online] Available at: https://business.mapsofindia.com/globalization/benefits.html [Accessed 28 Mar. 2015]. Hagen, I. and Halvorsen, T. (2009).Global privatization and its impact. New York: Nova Science Publishers. Hamilton, S. and Wood, B. (2009).Globalization. Edina, Minn.: ABDO Pub. Co. Haugen, D. and Mach, R. (2010).Globalization. Detroit: Greenhaven Press. 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