"The expansion of global fiber-optic networks and the commercialization of the internet have done for service occupations what containerization and cheap shipping did for manufacturing in the mid-twentieth century. Historically, tasks such as data entry, customer service, and software engineering required close physical proximity to a company's headquarters or customer base. Today, these information-based services can be performed anywhere on the globe and transmitted instantaneously. Consequently, American firms have increasingly offshored both white-collar and blue-collar jobs, restructuring the domestic labor force and contributing to a growing economic divide between highly skilled tech professionals and service-sector workers."
—Adapted from a sociological study on the post-industrial economy, 2005
The economic shifts described in the excerpt most directly contributed to which of the following developments in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries?
- AThe creation of Great Society programs that provided direct government employment for displaced manufacturing workers.
- BThe implementation of federal demand-side policies that significantly increased spending on public works to protect domestic service jobs.
- The decline in the membership and bargaining power of traditional industrial labor unions.Answer
- DThe primary shift of the labor force from agricultural self-sufficiency to localized factory work in New England.