DEMYSIFICATION OF INTERNATIONAL SUBCONTRACTING 51 drive or international subcontracting had been to benefit from all the conditions outlawed in the 'Core*.11 Furthermore, there was also the problem of recruiting and retaining indigenous labour which could vegetate over harder, dirtier and repetitive tasks in general under conditions involving low wages, inhuman working conditions, instability of employment, harsh and arbitrary discipline of work and little scope for advancement. Alongside these developments was a buoyant demand in the 'Core* for products involving labour-intensive manufacture. Meanwhile, in the 'Periphery', it was possible to use 'green' labour in conjunction with modem machinery; the wage differentials between the 'Core' and the 'Periphery' were enormous and widening; the wage gap under international subcontracting was much more than that under domestic subcontracting; and the labour productivity levels too compared favourably with or were even more than those in the 'Cb^e'. Consequently, the unit labour cost comparison for the same types of work done in the 'Core' (Fordist work as also all that work that was labour intensive) moved definitively in favour of the 'Periphery.' All those unprofitable operations in the 'Core' could be made profitable by subcontracting out to the foreign 'Periphery*. It was also the period of growing competitive rivalry under profit pressures between industrial countries, the rivalry being triggered by the Japanese forays into the American and later European territories. Profit pressures gave a violent shake-up to the evaluation of cost-structure and make-buy decisions, forcing transnational capitals of each industrial country to meet the challenge by seeking lower costs via international subcontracting. As far as many Third World countries were concerned, it was also the period that saw the basic conditioning factors for international subcontracting such as the crisis in import substituting industrialisation and the consequent precarious debt position, growing unemployment and poverty and the fear of internal rebellion, etc., and therefore, the decisive shift towards export-oriented industrialisation.12 It must be noted here that international subcontracting was not the only option open to and used by the employers at this conjuncture. For example, the American and later European automotive capitals, using Fordist techniques, valorised themselves by shamelessly exploiting immigrant labourers by paying them, as Navarro points out, often at less than the cost of reproducing their labour power. The utilisation of immigrant labour was particularly phenomenal in West Europe.13 But this option created new contradictions and fizzled out in the '70s. Racial tensions due to attacks on immigrant labour and rivalry between unionised national workers and unorganised immigrants developed. It is difficult to assess whether the decision to subcontract out of Europe had been a substitute for or complementary to the migration of workers.14 It could be both. Anyway, the era of net