Posted on 02/15/2005 6:44:11 AM PST by dennisw
"The Great American Job Sellout By Paul Craig Roberts
Americans are being sold out on the jobs front. Americans' employment opportunities are declining as a result of corporate outsourcing of US jobs, H-1B visas that import foreigners to displace Americans in their own country, and federal guest worker programs
President Bush and his Republican majority intend to legalize the aliens who hold down wages for construction companies and cleaning services. In order to stretch budgets, state and local governments bring in lower paid foreign nurses and school teachers. To reduce costs, US corporations outsource jobs abroad and use work visa programs to import foreign engineers and programmers. The American job give away is explained by a "shortage" of Americans to take the jobs.
There are not too many Americans willing to accept the pay and working conditions of migrant farm workers. However, the US is bursting at the seams with unemployed computer engineers and well-educated professionals who are displaced by outsourcing and H-1B visas. During Bush's entire first term, there was a net loss of American private sector jobs. Today there are 760,000 fewer private sector jobs in the US economy than when Bush was first inaugurated in January 2001.
For years the hallmark of the European economy was its inability to create any jobs other than government jobs. America has caught up with Europe. During Bush's first term, state and local government created 879,000 new government jobs. Offsetting these government jobs against the net loss in private sector jobs gives Bush a four-year jobs growth of 119,000 government jobs. Comparing this pathetic result to normal performance produces a shortage of 8 million US jobs. What happened to these jobs?
Over these same four years the composition of US jobs has changed from higher-paid manufacturing and information technology jobs to lower-paid domestic services. Why?
During this extraordinary breakdown in the American employment machine, politicians, government officials, corporate spokespersons, and "free trade" economists gave assurances that America was benefitting greatly from the work visa programs and outsourcing.
The mindless chatter continues. Just the other day Ambassador David Gross, US Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy in the State Department, declared outsourcing to be an economic efficiency that works to America's benefit. There is no sign of this alleged benefit in US jobs statistics or the US balance of trade.
Repeatedly and incorrectly, US corporations state that outsourcing creates more US jobs. They even convinced a New York Times columnist that this was the case.
The problem is, no one can identify where the US jobs are that outsourcing allegedly creates. They are certainly not to be found in the BLS jobs statistics. However, the Indian and Chinese jobs created by US outsourcing are highly visible.
On February 13, the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News reported that jobs outsourcing is transforming Indian "cities like Bangalore from sleepy little backwaters into the New York Cities of Asia." In a very short period outsourcing has helped to raise India from one of the world's poorest countries to its seventh largest economy.
Outsourcing proponents claim that US job loss is being exaggerated, that outsourcing is really just a small thing involving a few call centers. If that is the case, how is it transforming sleepy Indian cities into "the New York Cities of Asia"? If outsourcing is no big deal, why are Bangalore hotel rooms "packed with foreigners paying rates higher than in Tokyo or London," as the Dayton Daily News reports?
If outsourcing is of no real consequence, why are American lawyers or their clients paying $2,900 in fees plus hotel and travel expenses and two days' billings to attend the Fourth National Conference on Outsourcing in Financial Services in Washington DC (April 20-21)?
On the jobs front, as on the war front, the social security front and every other front, Americans are not being given the truth. Americans' news comes from people allied with the Bush administration or dependent on revenues from corporate advertisers. Displease the government or advertisers and your media empire is in trouble. The news most Americans get is filtered. It is the permitted news. Many "free trade" advocates also are dependent on the corporate money that funds their salaries, research and think tanks.
Another clear indication that outsourcing of US jobs is no small thing comes from the reported earnings of the leading Indian corporations that provide American firms with outsourced IT employees and engineers. During the recent quarter, Infosys' revenues increased by 53%, TCS grew by 38%, and Wipro was up 34%.
On January 1, 2001, Cincinnati-based Convergys Corp had one Indian employee. Today it has 10,000. Why? Because it can hire Indian university graduates for $240 a month, a sum that is a small fraction of the US poverty level income.
Many Americans think that an outsourced job is an existing job that is moved offshore. But many outsourced jobs are created offshore in the first place. On February 11, USA Today told the story of OfficeTiger, "the sort of young technology company that once created thousands of high-paying jobs in the USA, fueling sizzling economic growth." The five-year old startup business employs 200 Americans and ten times that number of Indians. The company has plans for hiring many more Indians to perform "tech-heavy financial services."
Under pressure from venture capitalists who fund new companies, American startup firms are starting up abroad. Thus, the new ventures, which "free trade" economists assured us would create new jobs to take the place of the ones moved offshore by mature firms, are in fact creating jobs for foreigners.
As a consequence, tech jobs in the US are falling as a percentage of the total. Clearly, tax breaks for venture capitalists are self-defeating when the result is to create jobs for foreigners, not for Americans. Why should the American taxpayer subsidize employment in India and China?
These developments have obvious adverse implications for engineering and professional education in America. The BLS jobs forecast for the next ten years says the vast majority of US jobs will not require a college education. University enrollments will decline and so will the production of PhDs as fewer professors are needed.
As India and China rise to first world status, the US falls to third world status where the only jobs are in domestic services.
This has enormous implications for the US balance of payments. Americans' consumption of manufactured goods is heavily dependent on foreign manufacture, whether that of foreign firms or that of US multinational firms that supply their American customers from offshore. How does an economy in which employment growth is concentrated in nontradable domestic services pay for its imports with exports?
Since 1990 the US has been paying for its imports by giving foreigners ownership of its assets. In the last 15 years foreigners have accumulated $3.6 trillion of America's wealth.
America has been able to pay for its consumption by giving up its wealth because the dollar is the world's reserve currency. As America's high-tech and manufacturing capabilities decline and its red ink rises, the dollar's role as reserve currency must end.
When the dollar loses its reserve currency role, America will not be able to pay for the imports on which it has become dependent. Shopping in Wal-Mart will be like shopping at Neiman Marcus.
Until recent years, US companies employed Americans to produce the goods that Americans consumed. Employment supported sales, and sales supported employment. No more. By their shortsighted policy of moving US jobs abroad, our corporations are destroying their American markets.
Economists give assurances that the dollar's decline and fall will bring jobs and industry back to the US. Once Americans are as poor as Indians and Chinese are today, the process will reverse. Multinational corporations will locate in America to take advantage of cheap labor and unserved markets. By becoming poor, the US can become rich again.
You might want to ask the economists and our "leaders" in Washington why we should put ourselves and our descendants through such a wrenching process."
--Jerry Leslie Note: les...@jrlvax.houston.rr.com is invalid for email
Within the market, yep. You're absolutely right. It isn't until recently that they've stood on other shores while undercutting their own countrie's workers competing against them and subverting them with overseas labor using dumping both in goods price and in wage price across the board.
What is happening now is treason. You might want to polish up on what treason is by definition beyond what I've posted here and maybe even get a historical perspective. It is not limited to acts of overt warfare or spying. You might compare it with sedition. But, I'd suggest many have gotten so used to doing what they dangwell please without concern for their fellow Americans that such considerations as sedition and treason largely do not either ocurr or matter till it's a spy, then hang 'em high. Intent is immaterial.
School lunch programs. I'm old enough to remember "hungry kids." After they were instituted there were no more hungry kids in my school.
breach of allegiance, aid and comfort, subversion. Yep, still got no evident problems there. Adherence to the enemy is pretty broad, standing on their shores and subverting your fellow citizenry is right up the alley. Treason. pure and simple.
China, as defined by law, is not our enemy. However, China is, weirdly, our competitor, creditor, and largest potential market for many products.
Oh, I might add, for a little insight on how little it takes to be treasonous, that John Kerry did something in meeting with the NorthVietnamese that back then evidently was not actionable. Today it would have him before a firing squad and he merely met with them in wartime. Unpatriotic here is so blatently inadequate a word as to be laughable.
John who?
I am told my family qualifies for reduced lunch/free lunch at our local Catholic school. The program has morphed into some quasi funding program.
Also ask consider this: First we had assistance programs because people didn't have enough money to live on.
Then we found out people would take their assistance checks and cash them and still have not enough money to live on.
So we come up with some new programs called housing assistance and Food stamps so the money would get spent on the right things.
We didn't just modify the assistance system already in place, no we created new programs which needed people to run them and desks for the people to set behind to do their work and budgets to fund the program.
Then we found out these folks getting food stamps still sent their kids to school without food or a way to pay for it.
Did we modify the present system? Nope. We created a new program with new people to run it and new desks to sit behind with a new budget...
Makes you wonder if we are making programs to help people or are we making programs to make government bigger?!?!
I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt vis a vis IT employment. I am a small businessman engaged in import/export trade. Please give me examples of high paying IT jobs in the USA going begging. Every year, we graduate thousands of IT hotshots from Harvard, Yale, Cornell, MIT,Johns Hopkins, RPI, Stanford,UCLA, Pomona College,Cal Tech........why are we hurting for talent?
"Makes you wonder if we are making programs to help people or are we making programs to make government bigger?!?!"
We are creating more programs, intended to fix the programs, which didn't fix the initial programs, ad nauseum, ad infinitum....and the only winners are those who are hired by the ever-bloated government hacks.
Could be but I am still having troble deciphering...
The question still stands, Did NAFTA cause unemployment to rise? Yes or no?
bump
China doesn't have to be our enemy by law. Japan wasn't our enemy by law until they bombed Pearl Harbor. A party acting overtly or covertly to subvert our system is by any definition an enemy. To the extent that Americans act either on their own or in concert with another government to subvert us, they have committed an overt act that is actionable. Failing to act upon it doesn't change what it is.
First off, you can't convince me that school lunch programs were/are a bad thing. It made a hugely powerful impression on me at a relatively young age.
Secondly, my opinion of welfare is probably not too different than your own. It was created and intended as a temporary measure, so that we didn't revert to the kind of deal the Victorians had in London, etc. It was never intended as a "lifestyle," much less as multi-generational.
I've actually given this some thought - the problem with gov't programs in general is that they rarely change to meet the needs of an environment. They don't evolve effectively or efficiently. Fire depts buy special equipment suited to the needs of their environment, whether it be suburban or urban. Same thing for cops and even garbage guys.
So, the question is: why can't social programs meet the needs of their environment as effectively as firemen, cops and trash collectors?
Yep that is why it annoys me that everyone wants the government to get involved in outsourcing.
Government got us here and now people want the government to fix it with newer better rules.
Yeah, that inspires confidence in me.
"Yeah, that inspires confidence in me."
: )
On my one trip to Wal-Mart I bought a salad spinner that was made in china -- am I a traitor?
I ain't asking the government to fix outsourcing. They did create the problem. What is being demanded is that it be undone - period. The more they "fix it" the more they screw us. Put it back the way it was before Nafta and stop screwing us. It isn't that hard.
Now you're being flip.
I fliptooooooooo
I fliptooooooooo
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