rested parties across the country or the world. While Reuters and Dow Jones are repackaging financial information for electronic subscribers, a startup company in Silicon Valley called QuoteCom is selling financial information over the Internet for as little as $10 per month. The Future Fantasy Bookstore in Palo Alto, California, put its catalog on the Internet and suddenly became a global firm. Small businesses with computer expertise can also set up shop as gateways to the Internet for their communities. In eastern Washington state, the Palouse Economic Development Council has established Palouse Net, a World Wide Web server and Internet aggregator for farmers and small businesses in rural Washington and Idaho. Telecommunications networks are creating a global information workforce, as employers seek the cheapest labor, ranging from clerical work, such as data entry, to software programming and research and development. American Airlines uses key punch operators in Barbados to enter data from its flight coupons, which are then fed by satellite and telephone lines back to American's central computers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. American reportedly saved $3.5 million on data processing in its first year. Mead Data Central, a provider of data base services, hires overseas workers primarily in Ireland, the Philippines, and South Korea to enter documents in its data bases. There are now at least seventy U.S. data processing firms with overseas facilities. In the short run, these clerical jobs offer attractive employment opportunities for developing countries, particularly those such as the Commonwealth Caribbean countries and the Philippines with relatively high literacy rates and an English-speaking work force. However, not only do these jobs have the same disadvantages as similar jobs in industrialized countries (low pay, boredom, little chance of advancement, stress from the pressure to reach productivity targets or from computerized monitoring...
