Gotta love this protest sign at the AFL-CIO link;)
Posted on 11/23/2011 3:18:30 PM PST by mdittmar
Terry Maile’s supervisor called her into a conference room with all of her co-workers to hear the news: It was their last day of employment at Level 3 Communications in Pittsburgh.
That was it. The jobs were gone to India.
“I couldn’t stop crying,” said Maile, a divorced mother of one, who until that moment had spent her professional life as a telecommunications worker before being laid off first by Verizon and then by Level 3.
Even then, Maile said, she still believed in the American Dream.
You’ve got to work hard… work hard.
Maile owned her own home. Although she had been forced to liquidate her retirement after the Verizon layoff, she had begun to build it back up. Then came the Level 3 layoff. It shook her to her core.
That was my defining moment. I was filling out paperwork, and I couldn’t help it…. I was just crying and crying. I said, ‘They don’t understand…. We’re all interconnected.’
Ten years ago, back when Maile worked at Verizon, she earned $75,000 a year. At Level 3, she was paid $50,000. Today, she makes $8.50 an hour at a retail job. She applies for professional jobs every day. Sometimes her application is one of 400.
Maile, 58, plans to travel to Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks to raise her voice for benefits for the long-term unemployed. If Congress fails to act before leaving town for the year, benefits will expire for workers who have searched fruitlessly for jobs for more than 99 weeks. Some 6 million workers will stop receiving weekly compensation of about $300.
Maile plans to campaign constantly for jobless workers.
I had been blaming myself, until I realized what’s happening, until I learned more about corporate greed. And then I got active….There is a way out, for all of us, and it’s with collective action. We don’t have another choice. All of us need to stand together.
If anyone here is unemployed/underemployed or has a relative, family member, friend or co-religionist who is, please FReepmail me. I have been a career counselor and recruiter since 1983.
Sorry but that’s the way it is. All this crap about how if we only did away with corporate income tax or dropped regulations or did away with Obamacare and then all these jobs would come flowing back is just that, crap. Corporations look at the bottom line only, and any chance they have to ship a job overseas to someone making a third of what an American makes they’ll take. It’s just the way companies operate today. And has been for going on 15 or 20 years now.
Thank you,lots of people outta work out there,I’m good,non union,7 weeks paid vacation a year,”You’ve got to work hard”,if you do,you will be fine.
You mean they want to make a profit,how mean spirited!
Here is how to get jobs back:
Cut income tax to 15%
Cut Corporate tax to 0%
Cut all regulations back to those present in 1980
Levy an equalization tax on all imports to make up for the lack of regulation in foreign countries.
Disabled here, so that’s not an option anymore.
How do you know something is “crap” until it is tried. It certainly hasn’t worked to have a corporate income tax of 35% when the other countries are at 25%. And it doesn’t help to pile on Obamacare and the EPA and the OSHA requirements. We are regulating and taxing ourselves to death.
Not this chit again!
Okay, so we need to take money that isn't there, put it up for a loan, print bills for those unemployed and make promises for repayment and pay those who don't produce the same as those who do produce so we can't tell the difference between the two until we no longer can survive financially.
It's the only compassionate thing to do. /s
Vuala, communism without freedom! Oh joy!
Uh, because the sending of jobs like this overseas was going on long before Obamacare and by corporations who were paying nowhere near 35% tax rates and before OSHA regulations of the last couple of years.
These jobs won't be coming back until people here are willing to work for a couple of dollars a day.
On the plus side, sounds like Maile has plenty of technical skills to offer and she’s a woman and possibly non-white. The big minus is her age, after 55 it’s very difficult to find a high paying salaryman job in a new company even in a good economy. I’m surprised she wasn’t more protected since she’s so close to retirement age.
Kinda sad,you would think with all those union dues she paid,the union would take care of her.
The reason jobs are leaving the county is because the amazing amount of crap companies have to deal with to do business, especially manufacturing, in the US is both astounding and devastating.
Then you have to look at the work ethics and low productivity of the average American worker.
The simple fact is that America has become a very, very bad place to do business so companies are following the path of least resistance and leaving the country.
Until Americans figure out that they are in a to the death economic equivalent of war with countries like China and start fighting back with harder work, higher productivity and less government regulations and taxation we will continue to sink and lose industrial base
Hint - if you get laid off because your job got outsourced to India, get together with other out of work people and start your own company and go into competition with either the Indians or the company that laid you off and kick their butts.
THAT's the American way to deal situations like these, not sitting on your dead ass for 99 weeks collecting unemployment like most seem to be doing
You do understand that labor rates overseas well before Obama office were substantially lower and there was no regulatory environment in those nations the jobs went? Would you suggest they manufacture their widgets here at double the production cost, become uncompetitive globally and go out of business because there is no market for for their uncompetitively priced products?
I'm saying that's the reason why they went there in the first place. Not corporate tax rates. Not Obamacare. Not OSHA or EPA. But dirt cheap labor. That's why the jobs are going to remain over there even if you abolished OSHA and the EPA and cut corporate rates to zero.
Uh, we have been OSHA and EPA regulated for more than 35 years. At my first job with a desk back in 1971 the wall beside my desk was the storage for over 30 boxes of a single EPA report for a single project. Yes, it was a trans-Alaska pipeline.
Part of my job back then was also performing the OSHA compliance stuff, like putting kick plates on a platform which had no scheduled use and hadn’t been used in 10 years. I believe that when I ascended the platform to affix said kick plates I was the first person on the platform in years.
But cutting the corporate tax rate and doing away with overregulation will create a counterbalance to their lower labor costs. China’s labor costs have been escalating and there are certain industries that are on the cusp of having jobs exported back to the US provided they we can go a little further in accommodating industry so they can manufacture here competitively.
“Corporations look at the bottom line only, and any chance they have to ship a job overseas to someone making a third of what an American makes they’ll take. It’s just the way companies operate today. And has been for going on 15 or 20 years now.”
You’re absolutely right; this situation is permanent. Unemployment will fall, when people realize that wearing a sandwich board outside a strip mall pays more than $0, but this is catastrophic. Support for ObamaCare will rise, as people realize that ANY health care is better than none. At this point, people who officially have “health care” can’t afford meds & premiums anyway.
Those jobs are one forever; I like how this story traces the falling wages of this woman. Funny how this is rarely directly connected to “housing bubbles” and “foreclosures”.
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