Posted on 04/17/2007 5:48:48 PM PDT by A. Pole
The master plan, it seems, is to move perhaps 40 million high-skill American jobs to other countries. U.S. workers have not been consulted.
Princeton economist Alan Blinder predicts that these choice jobs could be lost in a mere decade or two. We speak of computer programming, bookkeeping, graphic design and other careers once thought firmly planted in American soil. For perspective, 40 million is more than twice the total number of people now employed in manufacturing.
Blinder was taken aback when, sitting in at the business summit in Davos, Switzerland, he heard U.S. executives talk enthusiastically about all the professional jobs they could outsource to lower-wage countries. And he's a free trader.
[...]
Ron Hira has studied the dark side of the H-1B program. A professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he notes that the top applicants for visas are outsourcing companies, such as Wipro Technologies of India and Bermuda-based Accenture.
The companies bring recruits in from, say, India to learn about American business. After three years here, the workers go home better able to interact with their U.S. customers.
In other cases, companies ask their U.S. employees to train H-1B workers who then replace them at lower pay. "This is euphemistically called, 'knowledge transfer,' " Hira says. "I call it, 'knowledge extraction.' "
[...]
The companies fret that not enough young Americans are studying science and technology. Well, cutting the pay in those fields isn't much of an incentive, is it?
[...]
This vision for a competitive America seems to be a few rich U.S. executives commandeering armies of foreign workers. They don't have to train their domestic workforce. They don't have to raise pay to American standards.
[...]
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
Competitive America bump
“”Blinder was taken aback when, sitting in at the business summit in Davos, Switzerland, he heard U.S. executives talk enthusiastically about all the professional jobs they could outsource to lower-wage countries. And he’s a free trader.”
Free trader now sees jobs of his own field can be outsourced.
Since Pratt & Whitney moved drafting to India, I’d say we are already doomed....
I hate to tell Mr. Spitzer but this has already happended. There is not a single job in the excerpt that hasn’t already been ‘off-shored.’ Most are even considered skilled anymore.
Hi Sam:
It’s articles like this that show the ugly side of Free Trade even for professionals. I think your Dad is the only presidential candidate in the race who is in a position to take this issue by the horns. It could mean millions of votes. 40 million jobs tends to translate into tens of millions of votes.
Yes, this is happening. It's not as easy as these folks say and there are special difficulties managing remote workers, but for a bunch of reasons I am not going to enumerate here I think American-based engineers could hold their own for at least some time yet.
Ooops..”Mr.Blinder” vs. “Mr. Spitzer.”
Where I work they can’t find enough citizens and immigrants (illegal? don’t ask don’t tell) for the skilled IT positions. They have no choice but to either
a) kill the project or
b) offshore to India
Last year, I aveaged via email over 20 high paying jobs a week where the company seemed desperate. This year it seems to be over 50 jobs a week ... One email I received today directly from the hiring manager of an insurance company (my area of expertise) seemed especially desperate. Good salary, good benefits, good location in Chicago’s west loop next to the suburban commuter lines and to the expressways. He’s been trying to fill the same skilled position and just can’t find anyone willing to work in the West Loop. .... and I thought the place I work at had a hard time finding workers because it is in the middle of the corn fields.
The simple fact is that the economy is booming. (It’s all Bush’s fault.) Anyone who is willing and able has his pick of jobs.
The unemployment problems are structural.
- drug and alcohol abusers, excons, mentally ill have a hard time finding a good job. But I see them turning down construction jobs that they could have if they wanted them.
- Our public education system has failed to educate people with the ability to think. They learn how to FEEL about math and science and what to BELIEVE on global warming and evolution and a hundred other BELIEFS. But they are not taught how to handle facts and logic.
Witness some of the posts on FR where lack of facts and logic causes even conservatives to blame someone else (illegals, the MSM, etc) for their condition rather than to take personal responsibility for their situation.
The simple fact is that in the USA each of us is personally responsible for our personal situation. We cannot blame anyone or anything else ... not even our lousy public education ... for our inability to hit some imagined employment lottery prize.
I’m curious,
what job were the people you mention trying to fill?
what is your education(or the education they wanted)?
how many years experience do you have(or how many were they looking for)?
Thanks...
I guess outsourcing to foreign countries wasn't really a problem for society until it began to include his own career.(/sarcasm)
Now if only we could figure out a way to outsource politicians...
“Blinder was taken aback when, sitting in at the business summit in Davos, Switzerland, he heard U.S. executives talk enthusiastically about all the professional jobs they could outsource to lower-wage countries.”
And to add insult to injury,these executives won’t even hire the out of work US citizens to clean their pools or mow their lawns.They’ve got “illegals” to do that !!!
Poland was doing it for couple centuries by electing foreigners to be Polish kings. Guess how it ended.
If an industry or industries, in this country hires cheap labor in another country, either they eventually destroy their customer base here in the US or create a new one overseas, but will have to sell their goods for less defeating the original purpose.
Alan S. Blinder has been on the Princeton faculty since 1971, taking time off from January 1993 through January 1996 for service in the U.S. government—first as a member of President Clinton’s original Council of Economic Advisers, and then as Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In addition to his academic writings [books, academic articles] and his best-selling introductory textbook, he has written many newspaper and magazine columns and op-eds and, in recent years, has presented a monthly television commentary on PBS’s Nightly Business Report [PBS commentaries]. He also appears regularly on CNBC. Dr. Blinder is a past president of the Eastern Economic Association, past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Isn't this one of the economic geniuses from the Clinton days? Google him and you will find him linked to all sorts of liberal causes and philosophies (like being a signer of an academic petition to increase the minimum wage... after all every economists knows that all you have to do is force employers to pay more money and you will create more wealth... and jobs for that matter!).. Nothing he says is apolitical, this is a shot across the bow -- prob Hillary's upcoming weekly theme.
How much do they PAY?
1) Thanks to the decline in standards, younger college graduates have minimal critical thinking skills.
2) Companies have not adjusted to the idea that people who do have experience and critical thinking skills are demanding to be paid accordingly.
Thus, there is a now huge deficit of early-to-mid career professionals who can think and who are willing to to work in the same inflation-adjusted salary range they would have been willing to work in twenty years ago. Faced with a choice between paying more than they want to pay for the talent they need and spending a lot of money on remedial in-house training, companies are naurally looking overseas for a quick fix.
Companies who are smart enough to bite the bullet and pay the going rate are going to gain a competitive edge that more than makes up for the extra salary expense. Very few MBA-run firms get that concept, though. You start to run into senior managements with the "Well, I never got paid like that when I was coming up!" attitudes. Well, you didn't work now, Pops. The game has changed.
I suspect in your West Loop example, a "great salary" as opposed to a "good salary" would have rapidly attracted just the right candidate. ;)
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