[Editorial] Tidal Offshoring and Defending Force of Quality Education

Last year, the issue of “offshoring” engulfed the entire United States. The term “offshoring” describes the relocation of business processes, such as production and services from one country to another to cut corners. Since 2001, American manufacturers have relocated 1.8 million jobs out of the United States to China and India alone. In the process, low-wage manual factory workers in the U.S. were hit hardest.

Since the mid-1990s, the tidal change of “offshoring” has been reorganizing and restructuring the global labor force, influencing Korean workers as well. Korean companies settle in China and other Southeast Asian countries, leaving unskilled and uneducated South Koreans jobless.

The Korea Development Institute (KDI) and Japanese Hitotsubashi University studied, on commission from the OECD, the effects of the outsourcing in the East Asian region on the Korean and Japanese labor markets. According to the study, the exodus of the South Korean labor-concentrated industries to China has widened the income gap between the educated workers and the laborers in Korea. In 2004, for example, workers with a high school diploma received only 68 percent of the income earned by a college graduate. Previously in 1993, a high school graduate’s paycheck constituted 70 percent of that of a college graduate. Likewise, the middle school graduate earned only 58 percent of what college graduates earned in 2004. But in 1993, they earned 65 percent of workers with college degrees.

KDI researcher Ahn Sang-hun explained, “South Korea shows the steepest downhill in terms of uneducated workers’ job and income loss among the OECD member states. The more globalized the world becomes, the more labor jobs China and India attract. On the other hand, highly educated professionals enjoy higher incomes.” In other words, only quality education can increase the quality of labor force, and, thereby, protecting them from the ever-spreading “offshoring.”

As pointed out by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, the power of the global economy comes from the quality labor force. Only competitive education can produce the competitive labor force. That is why advanced countries hinge their future on educational advancement, which covers not only K-12 stages, but also higher educational institutes including colleges.

The national competitive edge depends on how wide a pool of quality human resources with creativity and knowledge a nation can produces. The size matters. What matters more is how qualified our handful of globally competitive top-notch human resources are. South Korea and South Koreans will not realize any hope for future, individual or national, with the current downgrading competition-free educational system.