Posted on 09/08/2004 3:36:00 PM PDT by Destro
Posted on Sun, Aug. 22, 2004
Business books: 'Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas'
"Exporting America: Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas," by Lou Dobbs (Warner Business Books, 208 pages, $19.95)
Look out, Silicon Valley! Bangalore, India, is gaining on you. Some folks in India even believe that their country's version of Silicon Valley has already surpassed its California counterpart as a center for high-tech employment.
In his new book, "Exporting America," CNN's Lou Dobbs shows how strongly that belief is held in India with a headline from the Jan. 6, 2004, issue of The Times of India: "Silicon Valley Falls to Bangalore."
The story under that headline, Dobbs writes, bragged that Bangalore has 150,000 information-technology engineers compared with 130,000 in Silicon Valley. Dobbs believes that that story can't be written off as merely nationalistic exaggeration.
"India is only one of the many countries benefiting from the exporting of American jobs. But it has also been one of the most aggressive in pursuing professional-level jobs, from medical technicians to software programs. American companies have been all too happy to answer India's siren call of educated English-speakers willing to work at some of the world's lowest wages," Dobbs writes.
General Electric's Capital International Services, Dobbs points out, was one of the pioneers of outsourcing domestic operations to India. The company, Dobbs writes, employs 1,300 at its four centers in India and says it saves about $400million annually by not having Americans do those jobs.
"The people there write software; they review invoices and insurance claims; they do market analysis. CIS also offers its services to other American companies looking for outsourced resources," Dobbs writes.
Although India lags behind other Asian countries in manufacturing, it has a leg up, according to Dobbs, in the service sector and is a magnet for some of America's highest-paying jobs.
"There are programmers all over the world, but the Indian Institutes of Technology (known as IITs) are turning out thousands of these programmers a year. They are men and women who are well-educated, speak impeccable English, and are thrilled to make $10,000 a year," Dobbs writes.
GE, as Dobbs makes clear in abundant detail, is only one of many companies outsourcing high-tech and professional jobs to India and other parts of the world where wage expectations are lower. Among the others spotlighted by Dobbs for outsourcing jobs to India, the Philippines, Romania, Ireland, Poland and other countries are IBM, SAS Institute, Intel, Microsoft, Perot Systems, Apple, Computer Associates, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
Early in the book Dobbs delivers a broadside against the general trend of shipping jobs offshore. He says it is undermining the American middle class, putting Americans out of work, forcing Americans to work harder and longer for less pay, devastating some communities and depriving governments at all levels of the tax revenue for upgrading public education and providing other essential goods and services.
Dobbs, whose views on shipping jobs offshore have been under continual attack by advocacy groups and consultants for multinational corporations, takes the view that corporations who send jobs offshore are firing their own customers, because American workers will eventually find themselves unable to purchase the goods and services being exported back to America by American companies.
"India can provide our software; China can provide our toys; Sri Lanka can make our clothes; Japan make our cars. But at some point we have to ask, what will we export? At what will Americans work? And for what kind of wages? No one I've asked in government, business or academia has been able to answer those questions," Dobbs writes.
- Cecil Johnson,
Knight Ridder Tribune
not the corporate sponsorship. are US chip companies paying to send 18 year old US kids to engineering school? are Chinese ones doing it? they are.
sure, alot of americans are dumb. so what, we don't need EVERY american to be capable of getting an engineering degree. Do we have enough smart high school graduates to fill these slots? of course we do, we always did, and we do now. what's driving them out of these programs are the employment and career opportunities they have when they graduate.
the proof is in the pudding. talk to some parents currently employed in engineering, and ask them where they are steering their college bound kids to. what do they know, what do they see at work everyday?
so the one maufactured product that we make here and actually EXPORT to other markets, that sells well, is "overpriced crap". that's just great.
Funny that you mention it . . . the parents I know who are engineers are steering their kids into engineering. EE especially, since all the EE's they and I know are rolling in cash.
A few things here. For one, the American worker untill the 90s did not have to compete with other workers on a global level. Sure, Japan and Korea had a large trade surplus with the US in the 80s, but the trade suplus these two nations ran were in large part motivated by cold war politics, being the US had many bases in their countries in exchange for allowing these nations to sell their goods in the US no questions asked and few levies raised.
That said, it is not just the blue collar workers who is losing his position, but it is many cases professionals with 4 years degrees, somtimes even more, who are being displaced. Other jobs that they may use their skill set in are being displaced, and sooner or later, this will become a powerful political factor in the US. Despite what Limbaugh says, there is no free lunch, there is no magic, and men and women who have invested their entire working life from their education to their carrer can not simpily retrain that easily, much less get a job that will pay as much as their previous jobs did. Yes there are exceptions, but it seems the US is being forced into a large experiment in social darwinism, and anyone who studies history can see how well that served Europe 100 years ago.
The one, huh? Nothing is funnier than watching a protectionist talk about exports.
you have businesses like restaurants and hotels - and all you hear from them is whining that "americans won't fill our jobs", "we need these illegals". why aren't they out there in the "marketplace" filing those jobs by offering wages to attract people?
you must know people I don't then.
Oh really!? And who are you, the pearl diver? So you think that we are all country club republicans, huh? We identify with multi-million dollar corporate executives and hate the great unwashed scum. (abuse report). Go away.
"If and when the offshoring stampede picks up in earnest during a Bush lame-duck second term, it could very well pave the way for Hillary in '08 with an American version of the European cradle-to-grave socialism now in place in those countries."
So in your simple mind the POTUS has everything to do with the outsourcing myth you and your minions have created. And you would save us all from cradle to grave socialism. Where did you come from and WHERE are you going? It can't be fast enough.
Guess this explains why the unemployment rate is at 5.4% the lowest in 3 years, and lower than the average rates during the 70's, 80's and 90's.
We have a stronger economy than any other western industrialize nation. But still we have the losers and the whiners who want to portray America as in the great depression with soup lines.
Let's face it, there are those who have positive outlooks on life, and there are those who complain and spread gloom and doom. And they get old and die and nobody has to listen to their whining anymore!
That's the problem with anecdotal evidence. [hint]
Yeah ....disrupting the habitat of the 3 flippered, one eyed tit mouse or a dues payin union mans benefits (same critter imo) hasn't a damn thing to do with it Lou.....
I'll stick with what I see everyday. and what I hear from my old college professors about who is enrolling in the programs now (and who isn't).
This is the way restaurants do work, and has never been a "sin". What would be a sin is thinking that one can arbitrarily raise prices to cover arbitrary wage increases and still expect people to come to the restaurant. All that will do is put you out of business.
What is unfortunate is that politicians often force restaurants to raise wages, with the same general outcome. That said, minimum wage increases are far more destructive to unionized businesses, since union wages are often pegged as a multiple of the minimum wage. Most non-union businesses are unaffected by minimum wage levels, which is part of why it is union type jobs that are so commonly outsourced.
Second - time for you spill. This "Electric Town" that you talk about - you go there often? What were the latest & greatest objects you saw? What did you last buy from there? No need to answer - just curious.
You are going in circles. What do these professors say about all these "foreign" students enrolling in their programs? That they're all in a head-long rush to get back to the motherland and earn 60-70% less than they can here?
Japan is the world's wealthiest nation in terms of net external assets, with its residents holding $1.6 trillion in net external assets, which equals 34% of their GDP. The Japanese government also owns over $600 billion of our Treasury debt (thus owning Treasury debt equivalent to about 6% of our total GDP.)
Japan has been number one in net external assets since 1991, and looks likely to continue to be so for the foreseeable future. (It is worth nothing that both Hong Kong and Switzerland have higher ratios of net external assets to GDP; however, they also have far smaller economies, thus putting them behind Japan in absolute terms.)
I wish they would stop saying this crap because it isn't true for any of the Indian software people I work with. Im a programmer and, yea sure, some of them are pretty sharp in terms of writing code (better than I am), but the majority are worse than the Americans I work with because they DONT speak or write English very well and they dont have a whole lotta initiative.
I don't care. They have no "right" to employ illegals to lower their wage rates. If they cannot charge an amount for their food that people are willing to pay to cover their wage costs, let them go out of business. if they argued that they needed slavery to stay in business, would you give it to them?
Non enforcement of immigration ruls amounts t o a de facto govrenmnet subsidy.
errr rules
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