Posted on 08/19/2003 10:13:15 AM PDT by luckydevi
Exporting Jobs by Walter Williams (August 19, 2003)
Summary: It'd make far more sense for Americans to start attacking the real sources that have contributed to making foreign operations more attractive to those at home. It's more effective than caving to the rhetoric of leftist and rightist interventionists who mislead us with slogans like, "How can any American worker compete with workers paid one and two dollars an hour?" when in reality our real competition is mostly with European workers earning a lot more.
[www.CapitalismMagazine.com]
Among George Orwell's insightful observations, there's one very worthy of attention: "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Let's look at a few examples of corrupted language, thought and information.
Pretend you're a customs inspection agent. There's a cargo container awaiting a ship bound for foreign shores. You ask the shipper, who works for a big corporation, what's in the container. He answers, "It's a couple of thousand jobs that we're exporting overseas to a low-wage country."
What questions might you ask? How about, "What kind of jobs are in the container?" or, "Are they America's high-paying jobs?" Most people would probably say: "You're an idiot! You can't bundle up jobs and ship them overseas!"
A job is not a good or service; it can't be imported or exported. A job is an action, an act of doing a task. The next time a right- or left-wing politician or union leader talks about exporting jobs overseas, maybe we should ask him whether he thinks Congress should enact a law mandating U.S. Customs Service seizure of shipping containers filled with American jobs.
Let's turn to the next part of the exporting jobs nonsense, namely that corporations are driven solely by the prospect of low wages. Let's begin with a question: Is the bulk of U.S. corporation overseas investment, and hence employment of foreigners, in high-wage countries, or is it in low-wage countries?
The statistics for 1996 are: Out of total direct U.S. overseas investment of $796 billion, nearly $400 billion was made in Europe (England received 18 percent of it), next was Canada ($91 billion), then Asia ($140 billion), Middle East ($9 billion) and Africa ($7.6 billion). Foreign employment by U.S. corporations exhibited a similar pattern, with most workers hired in high-wage countries such as England, Germany and the Netherlands. Far fewer workers were hired in low-wage countries such as Thailand, Colombia and Philippines, the exception being Mexico.
The facts give a different story from the one we hear from the left-wing and right-wing anti-free trade movement. These demagogues would have us believe that U.S. corporations are rushing to exploit the cheap labor in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Ethiopia. Surely with average wages in these countries as low as $10 per month, it would be a darn sight cheaper than locating in England, Germany and Canada, where average wages respectively are: $12, $17 and $16 an hour.
Let's look at a few of the reasons why some U.S. corporations choose to carry their operations overseas. Much of it can be summed up in a phrase: less predatory government and the absence of tort-lawyer extortion. While foreign governments can't be held guiltless of predation, their forms of predation might be cheaper to deal with than those of our EEOC, OSHA, EPA and IRS. Plus, tort lawyer extortion and harassment in foreign countries is a tiny fraction of ours. With each tort lawyer extortion and expansion of predatory regulations at federal, state or local levels of government, foreign operations become more attractive to U.S. corporations. Free trade helps make those costs explicit. American workers are just about the most productive in the world -- however, our government and legal establishment have reduced that productive advantage.
It'd make far more sense for Americans to start attacking the real sources that have contributed to making foreign operations more attractive to those at home. It's more effective than caving to the rhetoric of leftist and rightist interventionists who mislead us with slogans like, "How can any American worker compete with workers paid one and two dollars an hour?" when in reality our real competition is mostly with European workers earning a lot more.
Haha. Everyone's all crossed up on this thread (myself included). JNB said that the 1930s was a more moral, church-going time in America. But then he said when people are poor and see no jobs out there, they "have nothing to lose", and will commit crime. So I was asking him, which is it?
Personally, I think the "good old days" of American Christianity are often overrated. Church attendance does not mean higher morality per se. (There was also a very high crime rate in the 1930s.) But whatever the case is, my only point is that poverty is a lousy excuse for crime and there have been many poor communities around this country and world where crime and morality were very high (including the black community in America which was much more moral, much less crime-ridden, when it was much poorer, than it is now).
Never said anything about the Founding Fathers. I said the original Americans were far more Calvinist (i.e. Puritans, many of the Pilgrim communities, etc.) than they were Catholic. You said Calvinist societal approaches lead to communism. Well it clearly didn't in early America. Funny, the strongest that labor and socialists have ever been in America were in the 1920s through 1960s, in the generations of and after a massive immigration from Catholic countries. The blue states are overwhelmingly the Catholic states, whereas the red states are more Protestant. Get out your map and look that up if you don't belive it. I have no problem with Catholics being here, but if you're going to make a dumb claim (out of the blue), you should have the facts.
Let's be very clear here. Monopolistic tactics are ANTI-capitalist.
Not really. I'm just as much against those things as you are.
Yes.
Huh?
To be fair, the earliest settlements almost starved themselves out of existence by taking communal approaches to agriculture, et al. They quickly changed their ways in order to survive.
(not saying whether this has anything to do with Calvinism)
The conservatism that I and many other Catholics(and others that could be termed "paleos"), are rooted in is not a American based conservatism, but more based from Europe. It is about defense of Westeren Civilisation being the primary goal, stability to feed the culture, not bowing down to dogmatic free markets and free trade.
I agree with that assessment. I think one group enjoys a more hierarchical structure whereas the other enjoys more individualism. That's historical and you can see how it plays out in voting patterns even today.
The facts give a different story from the one we hear from the left-wing and right-wing anti-free trade movement. These demagogues would have us believe that U.S. corporations are rushing to exploit the cheap labor in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Ethiopia. Surely with average wages in these countries as low as $10 per month, it would be a darn sight cheaper than locating in England, Germany and Canada, where average wages respectively are: $12, $17 and $16 an hour.
I would like to know the source for Walter William's claim that the most workers hired by U.S. corporations in 1996 were in high-wage countries such as England, Germany, and the Netherlands. In any event, this no longer appears to be the case. Following is an excerpt from an article titled "Pink Slips Continue Unabated Over U.S. Technology Drain" that can be found at http://news.tradingcharts.com/futures/1/8/39313681.html:
“India for now is, by far, the biggest but not the only beneficiary of this trend. Russia, China, and others, with an educated and cheaper workforce, are getting involved as well. Every year hundreds of thousands of college grads, in those countries, with degrees in computer science, are replacing U.S. programmers, and unfortunately this trend has just begun.
This points to a major flaw in William's arguments. He makes much of the fact that countries that simply have very low wages (such as Thailand, Colombia, Philippines, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Ethiopia) are not major targets for outsourcing. In fact, the countries that are major targets are those with low wages AND educated workforces. These include India, China, and Russia, none of which are mentioned by Williams. As far as the number of jobs being outsourced, the article goes on to say:
“A grassroots movement to stop offshore is emerging. On June 23, the AFL-CIO gave testimony before a U.S House of Representatives Committee on Small Business and quoted a study, by Forester Research, that estimates 3.3 million jobs and 136 billion in wages to shift overseas in the next decade. A survey by DeLoitte Research forecasts a shift of 2 million jobs and 356 billion by 2008, and this is just within top 100 financial services firms. Both studies paint a bleak picture for white-collar technology jobs."
The DeLoitte Research survey can be found at http://www.deloitte.com/dtt/cda/doc/content/dtt_research_fsi_offshorefinance_063003.pdf. Concerning the number jobs expected to be outsourced in the financial-services area, it states:
We estimate that 13 million people are employed in financial-services jobs in mature industrial economies. Taking the same 15 per cent cost savings, this translates into the potential movement of up to two million jobs.
Regarding where the jobs are expected to go, it states:
In the future, we anticipate that offshore activity will be spread around the Indian Ocean Rim — from South Africa, through the Indian sub-continent, to China, Malaysia and down to Australia. The hub market will be India, potentially accounting for as many as one million new positions from offshored financial services.
In summary, Williams needs to provide the source for numbers that support his contentions. His contention that the outsourced jobs are going chiefly to high-wage countries is either wrong or seriously out-of-date.
I don't think it's an accident at all. I just don't think it's due to free market capitalism. I also realize the poor in this country have it better than the poor anywhere else in the history of the world. I also realize that what has happened in the black communities for the most part is the fault of the black "leaders" that came after the 1960s. It's sad actually... black Americans achieved one of the most impressive improvements in the 100 years after the Civil War that any culture has ever seen... and then some corrupt leaders of theirs (as well as with some "well-meaning" whites leftists) convinced a majority in these communities that families weren't necessary, poverty is a good excuse for crime, etc. I don't doubt that this is happening now in "white" communities, but it is happening across the board, from rich to poor.
You really should get outside this country sometime and see how people of a socioeconomic level equal to that of blacks in America are doing. You'd probably shutup with all the whining and looking for people to blame and start working to fix the problem. Blacks achieved what they did through strong Christian churches and families... then threw that all away. How sad. If you can't see that that is the case, then you won't be able to fix the problem.
Thank you for your excellent comment!
This isn't a Catholic/European thing. Granted I am a Catholic, myself. It is a Christian/American thing.
Never forget that today's fundamentalist social conservative is the grandchild of a New Deal Democrat and the great great grandchild of a William Jennings Bryan Populist. He never saw "individualism and the free market" at all costs as the highest goods. How could a Christian see pride and avarice as higher than compassion and justice ? A Christian most definitely understands that there most assuredly is such a thing as a community (all that "two or more gathered in my name" stuff) and it does have a moral character that can be impacted by political/economic choices (it really does matter whether you have an Ahab or a Hezekiah at the top). It is Ayn Rand libertarianism, an atheistic, Social Darwinist ideology that is European to the core in its willingness to expend whole classes of the "unnecessary" to the ideological vision of a "might makes right" world.
Underclasses do not magically spring up out of nowhere. They are created when whole classes of people are, in effect, condemned to death by the free market. Just as the "Oliver Twist" underclass was created when the British gentry destroyed their own peasantry to free up land for sheepherding, sending masses of refugees flooding into the cities, so the present underclass was created when the global economy destroyed the need in the first world for low-semi skilled factory labor. This triggered an explosion of vice then as now. Victorian London saw the greatest explosion of prostitution in human history. Cheap gin was the crack cocaine. All those ragged newsboy street urchins were pedophile heaven. That is why the early Victorian reformers like Wilberforce and Matthew Arnold recognized that draining the pool of vice meant ending slavery, promoting emigration, and reforming working conditions. They recognized that where labor is cheap, life is cheap and flesh is cheap.
The Victorian underclass responded to moral and cultural stimuli. In the expanding industrial economy of the time if you worked hard, stayed out of trouble, stop spending your paycheck on gin you could create a better life. There was grounds for optimism as positive behavior was visibly rewarded. Elites were solidly committed to uplift and moral reform. Now, in a world where positive behavior is neither respected nor rewarded for low-semi skilled workers vice flourishes.
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