When my job was offshored, I wasn't doing any thing so useless as tightening bolts for $30bucks an hour. I was responsible for fixing computer problems that caused hundreds to millions of dollars in downtime per minute. My job wasn't Union. So, tell me precisely how the unions which have to do with a minor percentage of offshored jobs brought this on all of us? Blow smoke elsewhere. Unions may be abusive, and on that we will far more than agree; but, they are not the reason for what is happening by far. Companies don't want to pay market rates. So they've settled for subversion because it's profitable. Chambers was right. And I'm with Coulter, the left would hate him too but it would require some reading..
You were in a job that was bound to go bust. With the huge surge in networking and computerization in the late 80s and 90s, there was a shortage of IT professionals in the marketplace....some were being hired at 6 figures!
Lots of people became IT certified and the market was then flooded.
Your job loss was simple supply and demand.
This phenomenon merely illustrates the point that we, as a nation, must continually be innovators (at the individual and corporate levels). That may seem burdensome to people, but that's the tradeoff for the astonishing affluence of the American people.
Companies seek the lowest cost or they don't survive. Take revenue and subtract cost. If someone costs less, they get the revenue.
The freest economy creates the most wealth AND JOBS. As was posted above, an arguement can be made that this economy is the best ever, right now. Not every profession/industry is healthy. Just the whole economy is in the best shape it has ever been in from a job and profit standpoint.
I agree that there is much fear and apparent danger in the job market. But the facts are that 5% unemployment is a "don't want to work rate." Walmart is the countries largest employer. That says quite a bit; maybe that's a bad thing.
Long ago I saved this post(forgot who to credit it to) because it concerns something we CAN fix that would help the average middle class person, the great American economic engine...
Most manufacturing has little to do with labor costs. The premise in all these anti free trade pitches is that the driving force of companies leaving the USA is labor.
That is a lie
Labor has not been a factor in mass produced goods for nearly a century. When Henry Ford Sr doubled his employees wages over 80 years ago people were certain that he would go broke. Just a few years earlier there had been 400 hours labor in making a car. And doubling wages would have nearly doubled the price of a car.
What the critics didn't know was that Fords assembly line had reduced the labor in a single new car from 400 hours to 4 hours. Back then wages were two dollars and fifty sents a day. Ford doubled them to five dollars a day. That meant he increased his cost per car by one dollar and twenty five cents. Cars cost 250 dollars back then. A static analysis showed it to be less than a half a percent cost increase. Actually workers were so happy with the raise and so afraid of loseing their jobs that production increased. Fords cost of labor per car went down when he doubled wages.
The only number that counts is the value added to the product for each dollar of labor spent. That number is great here in the USA. It is not better in other countries. How much it costs to make the product is the factor. What labor is getting paid is not a factor. The labor cost in each item produced is the important labor number. That number is very good in the USA.
The ratio today are even greater than it was in Fords time. Companies don't take jobs to foreign nations to save on labor. There are only very small if any savings in cheaper foreign labor. Usually transporting the stuff back to he US to sell costs more than the higher labor costs in the US. The reaon jobs leave here to go to foreign nations is the cost of government.
Politicans never tell you that. But it is the truth.
Labor costs are small as a percentage of total costs. But governemnt costs way over half of the profits in the USA. Government regulations and taxes and other government chrages cost way more than labor. So if the cost of taxes (government) and regulations (government) is very low in other nations, a company can put up with poor quality labor and higher unit labor costs of the lousy foreign workers. It actually costs more labor to make mass produced products in other nations. The only exceptions are labor intensive, hand made items. If it is hand made, the labor costs are cheaper outside the USA. But few items are hand made today. Most everything is mass produced.
If Cheap labor were the answer then the South with free slave labor would have out produced the North in the Civil War. The North while paying greatly inflated war wages out produced the South.
Africa has many nations that allow slave labor. Is any labor cheaper than slave labor? Why can't the Slave owners in Africa get work for their slaves. They can't even make stuff to sell in other slave holding nations.
Labor is cheap in the USA. Government is very expensive. >>>
A couple of hours of work, and you were set for life! Good deal!
My curiousity about your personal situation is piqued by this statement. Did you work on the hardware or the software of such systems? There are very, very few systems in the world that clock in the millions per minute. Various financial services and exchanges (equities, bonds, commodities, forex, etc.), credit card processing and extremely large retail operations like WalMart are the class of operations that use computer environments that handle $525.6 billion or more per year of transactions so frequent that you can measure downtime on a $1M (or more) per minute basis.
If you were one of the people who architect and manage such environments, then you should be able to parlay that experience into your own business.