By William Bole
     
As a young, married man in 1972, Ted Quant did something that was perfectly ordinary at the time. He landed a low-skilled job at a sugar refinery near New Orleans and instantly began earning a living wage. "You weren't living large," he recalled, "but you were able to support a family."
     
If it sounds like economic history, it's because of America's shriveled industrial base, a process accelerated by global forces. The refinery job still exists, but a string of others that Quant worked, including stints on the docks and at a glass factory, are gone. They have been plentifully replaced by jobs in service sectors such as tourism that are similarly low-skilled but also low-paid.
     
As an African American, Quant draws a link between these economic shifts and the culture of black New Orleans, then and now.
     
"You had a middle class in the black community in which children grew up in homes with mothers and fathers, where you had the value system of a middle-class community, and you had the incomes to support that," he said in a telephone interview. "That economic support structure for a middle-class lifestyle in the black community is no longer there." Indeed, the low-rung tourism jobs can barely sustain families, and the jobholders tend to be single mothers or unmarried men.     
     
Today, Quant (who was freshly out of college when he took those laborer jobs) is director of the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University in New Orleans. It is one of 16 Jesuit-related centers participating in a study of globalization's impact on the United States, spearheaded by the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.
     
In the past year, the subject of globalization has become as contentious as it is amorphous. The usual debate is over the impact of global markets on developing countries. The phenomenon is often seen as running in one direction: from rich nations, namely the United States, outward. But these processes are inevitably shaping American life and culture, though the effects may be dim or double-edged.
     
"Globalization in the U.S. -- understanding its effects on us -- is a new animal," said Father Gasper Lo Biondo, S.J., an economist and Woodstock senior fellow who is directing the center's Global Economy and Cultures Project. "We know that there is an X factor here, and we are admitting that the X is unknown."
     
As for ill effects, he pointed out that the United States isn't "simply the one that's causing the problems. It is itself suffering the problems. And so we need to bring out those nuances in the worldwide conversation."
     
In their Labor Day 2000 statement, the U.S. bishops called for a "Catholic conversation on economic globalization framed by our tradition and values." The statement, signed by Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles, noted, "These certainly are very good times [in America]. But the big picture can mask the growing gap between rich and poor."
     
Sixteen Jesuit social centers are producing narratives of globalization and local cultures in the United States. This is an add-on to the global project coordinated by Woodstock, involving several dozen Jesuit centers on five continents. (The three-year project will host its second international consultation, October 16-20 in Washington.)
     
A Jesuit conversation on the subject is bound to be less rowdy than arguments surrounding the World Trade Organization's Seattle summit nearly a year ago or last spring's meeting in Washington of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Still, a June 23-25 consultation at Georgetown (involving U.S. Jesuit centers) indicated that a distinct plurality of perspectives could be found among Jesuits as well.
     
Referring to WTO rules, Father Tom Florek, S.J., who ministers to Hispanics in the Midwest, said, "Globalization is specifically geared to protect corporations and business people -- to eliminate any responsibility for the environment or labor." Father Florek, coordinator of the Instituto Cultural del Liderazgo Medioeste, added: "Part of globalization is a war against local working people."
     
Striking a somewhat different tone, Father Drew Christiansen, S.J., a senior Woodstock fellow, said Catholic social teaching looks sympathetically upon global processes, because of the "increase in ties between people." Those ties are apparent in Church ministries, as Father Jim Pierce, S.J., has seen in the new cultural links between African American parishes in Buffalo and West Africa.
     
Father Jim Redington, S.J., a new Woodstock senior fellow, said the great task is "for workers to learn to manage globalization rather than fight it as an enemy until death, to open it up rather than consider it an adversary."
     
Responding to that, Father Tom Gannon, S.J., gave the widest endorsement of globalization and its impact on the United States. "Clearly, globalization is succeeding so somebody is managing it rather well and it's not just all the big mucky mucks," said Father Gannon, who heads the Heartland Center in Hammond, Indiana.
     
He pointed to economic development that has come with globalization, generating wealth and jobs. "The unemployment rate in our area (northwest Indiana) is lower than it's ever been. Now the jobs are different, but there are more jobs. There are new opportunities opening up."
     
Some of those jobs are on casino boats that pay fairly low wages but have helped steady a tax base wobbled by industrial decline. Other jobs have surfaced in high- or medium-tech industries, mostly outside urban cores. And the task there, Father Gannon stressed, is to help the unskilled gain access to those opportunities.
     
But what about the quality of jobs produced with such plentitude in the new economy?
     
"There's a strong, strong insecurity that comes with these news jobs," said Father Tom Colgan, S.J., who ministers to Native Americans in Spokane, Washington, referring to poverty-level wages with no benefits.
     
"Globalization is raising boats, but only a few. Many boats are just sitting there. People are working, working, working way more time and don't have time for things like reading, contemplation, updating," said Father Colgan, co-director of the Kateri NW Ministry Institute. "I don't want to be negative, but the benefits are so mixed, especially if you are on the Native or minority end."
     
A heavy slice of the "X factor" that Father Lo Biondo spoke of is how globalization is helping or hurting the poor.
     
The story of industrial shrinkage told by Quant points to a new poverty in which the poor are often juggling two or three dead-end jobs. The upside is remarkably low joblessness, which has a cultural and psychological value that goes well beyond paychecks. With nearly full employment, poverty rates have dipped but only modestly during America's longest economic boom.
     
One question is the extent to which these various trends owe to globalization. (The phenomenon is generally defined as the extension of free-market economies to virtually everywhere.) For example, the shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy has been underway for more than a few decades. At the same time, new information technologies have eased the way to overseas production, seriously accelerating the process.
     
A deeper and more elusive X factor is the impact of globalization on culture, defined as the way people live, think, feel, organize themselves, celebrate, and share life.
     
Theologian Robert J. Schreiter has written that globalization extends the effects of liberal modernity throughout the world. That includes modernity's "first product, Western culture." What can be quickly forgotten is that modernity is still extending to cultural pockets in this country, notably among Native Americans.
     
On the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, Father Bob Hilbert, S.J., has seen Arapaho families in which children are talking back to elders for the first time and in which television displaces an increasing share of communal time. Even something so seemingly ordinary as paid employment, beyond household and ranch, has altered family and tribal dynamics.
     
He tells of one 17-year-old boy who has become absorbed in computers and the Internet but has also made a vow to do the Sun Dance, the central religious event of the Arapaho year. "How is he going to live with those two? I don't know," said Father Hilbert, who is associate pastor at St. Stephen's Mission.
     
The Global Economy and Cultures Project is paying special attention to the work world. Analysts have scarcely begun to explore the effects of rapidly shifting work patterns on culture and values. For example, "no long term" has become an apt slogan in today's economy of short stints and contingent work. What does that do to the social bonds of trust, loyalty, and mutual dependence? That is the subject of Richard Sennett's 1988 book, "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism" (Norton).
     
Father Ted Arroyo, S.J., pondered the vanishing "sense of one life vocation" in which a carpenter, say, gains pride from a lifetime of craftsmanship. "People are taking two or three jobs, changing vocations every five years, and I think that is important socially and psychologically, an anthropological consequence of globalization," said Father Arroyo, a Woodstock senior fellow who edits the monthly newsletter Blueprint for Social Justice at the Twomey Center.
     
One tangible link to family life is the fact that in the old economy, a man could lift himself out of poverty literally by the strength of his hands. Good manual-labor jobs helped sustain communities like African-American neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., where Quant grew up in the 1950s.
    
"Everybody had a momma and daddy. You didn't have to lock your door. You didn't even have a lock on the back door," he reminisced. "It was sort of like a black version of 'Leave it to Beaver.'" That whiff of nostalgia is striking when you consider that Quant grew up in the twilight of segregation.
     
Quant's brother may be less nostalgic. He is a computer software consultant who works for banks in New York by modem from his home in Los Angeles. He's doing just fine.

SIDEBAR:

     
The precise effects of globalization on immigration patterns have become a conversation item in the U.S. portion of the Global Economy and Cultures Project.
     
Immigration, of course, is emblematic of American history. But Father Tom Florek, S.J., sees a fresh tie to economic globalization in the waves of Mexicans arriving in the Midwest to take low-paid, non-union construction jobs.
     
Indeed, economist Juan Floriani, an adviser to the project, traces part of the migration to international austerity policies that have pushed Mexico to dismantle subsidies and "paternalistic programs." Monetary policies have triggered upheaval along with a slashing of jobs only partly replaced by new factories in Mexico.
     
Beyond that, immigration poses a moral challenge to the United States, which preaches open borders economically but has recently adopted some harsh policies toward immigrants.
     
In that vein, Father Wagner Rafael Suarez, S.J., of the Hispanic Lay Leadership Program in New York, said, "I think immigration is the price the first world has to pay for the [new] economy."
    
     
William Bole is an associate fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University in Washington.