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One world?

By the year 2000, with the collapse of the Communist economic system in the Soviet Union and the liberalisation of Communist China, capitalism was the only viable economic system in the world (with irrelevant local exceptions such as Cuba and North Korea). At the end of the century, economic growth demanded the acquisition of the skills and investment required by increasingly complex new technologies.

In the West, the change from workers with expectations of a job for life within a single company and adequate social security to a more flexible but less secure workforce – an increasing proportion of which was freelance and working from home – increased the pressure of work. The growth in credit cards and personal indebtedness was also a symptom of a way of life that was driven by technological advance.

In other parts of the world, the need to produce raw materials, or heavy industrial plant, called for a more traditional workforce.

The gradual emancipation of women during the course of the century has also been reflected in their presence in the labour market. However, issues of unequal pay and a glass ceiling on promotion in some types of work remain areas of conflict.

The increased power of multinational companies, some of which have annual turnovers equal to the wealth of a small country, have meant that their political agenda – free-market policies and few union rights – has been adopted by almost all governments around the world. In the 1990s, the decade in which globalisation accelerated with unparalleled speed, the GDP of the world increased by perhaps 40%, although only a few countries really benefited from this.

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