By host Tom Ashbrook:

Here’s the split-screen reality of our globalized world: President Bush on his way to Beijing, celebrating open markets and free trade. And American auto worker Chris Brown, 47-years-old, with a family outside Detroit, looking at his 26-dollar-an-hour factory wage being slashed, maybe in half.

President Bush, we’re told, doesn’t even like to say the word “globalization,” but the global economic dynamic is unmissible if you are–or were–on an American factory floor. And while globalization may be inevitable, the maintenance of an American middle class life for American workers very clearly is not.

Hear about globalization and the future of American jobs and wages.

Guests:

Richard Wolffe, Senior White House correspondent, Newsweek

Jeffrey McCracken, automotive reporter, The Wall Street Journal. His recent front page story is “Shifting Down: A Middle Class Made by Detroit is Now Threatened by Its Slump”.

Marvin Zonis, Professor Emeritus of Business Administration, University of Chicago and president of Marvin Zonis & Associates, a political risk consulting firm. He is author of “The Kimchi Matters: Global Business and
Local Politics in a Crisis-Driven World”.

Robert Scott, international economist, Economic Policy Institute.