World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

One of the long-term effects of globalization is to induce a convergence of wages and working conditions (at least theoretically).  For high wage countries, this means wages will go down, and this has certainly been the case since the 1970s.  For low wage countries, wages should rise, but this effect has not been as apparent.  Now, however, it appears as if this effect is beginning to take hold.  One of the largest suppliers for Apple products, Foxconn, a Taiwanese company that operates in China, has been plagued by worker protests and suicides because of working conditions.   It has responded to these problems, largely because of protests in the developed world, by finally raising wages.

We tend to look at the Israeli-Iranian conflict through the lenses of the United States, but we all need to remember that there are a very large number of alternative perspectives on the conflict.  There is a fascinating column in the Times of India which does an excellent job of looking at the conflict from the perspective of India–a perspective that fleshes out many of the dimensions of the conflict that we tend to ignore.