Hightower Lowdown

Just when you think that the off-shoring craze has surely peaked, here come more stories of globalization gone wild.

McClatchy Company, the California-based newspaper chain, has announced that copyediting and design work for certain sections of its Miami Herald will be done by a New Delhi corporation with the mind-boggling name, Mindworks Global Media. The work to be handled for the Herald from 8,400 miles away includes editing and design for a weekly section on community news.

Meanwhile, Waterford, the classy crystal maker that has been in Dublin, Ireland, since 1783, has cut half of its Dublin workforce and moved a chunk of its production to Poland and the Czech Republic. Eastern European workers will be paid a fourth of what the Dublin artisans got to make this pricey, quintessentially Irish glassware, which ranges from chandeliers to champagne flutes. Waterford's CEO says that prices won't be reduced and that consumers don't care where the crystal is made.

And some couples don't care where their baby is made either. There's a growing global industry of outsourced pregnancies, with clinics in India offering local young women from very-low-income families to be surrogate mothers for well-off, infertile couples from America, Taiwan, and elsewhere. The couples provide their own fertilized eggs, pay a fraction of the going rate for surrogate moms at home, and--voila!--the "wombs for rent" clinics deliver a baby.

In the globalization follies, the wealthy scour the globe for ever-lower priced workers to service their every need.