Free Republic

Harley-Davidson on Monday announced that it would move production for its European customers overseas, in order to avoid the European Union’s (EU) new import duties. President Trump slammed the move and accused the company of raising the “white flag” of economic surrender on Twitter. Trump is right. Harley-Davidson’s decision is perhaps the most incompetent public relations blunder since Starbucks said it would replace 10,000 American workers with Syrian refugees—no doubt they will pay a heavy price. In the meantime, Harley’s loss is our gain, as every individual failure makes the whole stronger.

Variety reported on Monday about Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger hosting a fundraiser next week for six vulnerable Democrat senators. Although the story did point out the irony of Disney pushing for the tax cuts that every one of the senators voted against, it skipped the more controversial detail that the senators would be receiving money from a fundraiser hosted by an executive who pushed for replacing American Disney employees with H1B visa foreign workers.  First let us go to the irony of a tax cut supporting company supporting senators who all opposed that tax cut in Bob Iger to...

Bipartisanship on the divisive issue of immigration is a rarity in Congress, but that is what happened when the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved legislation making it harder for Indian outsourcing companies to bring high-skilled foreign workers to the U.S. At the same time, the bill eases rules on some U.S. high-tech firms that use H-1B visas, putting political distance between Silicon Valley and Indian outsourcers as President Donald Trump condemns the program as rampant with abuse and a source of unfair competition to American workers. The new rules apply only to companies that are heavy users of the program,...

The man from Mexico followed a manager through the factory floor, past whirring exhaust fans, beeping forklifts, and drilling machines that whined against steel. Workers in safety glasses looked up and stared. Others looked away. Shannon Mulcahy felt her stomach lurch. It was December 2016. The Rexnord Corporation’s factory still churned out bearings as it always had. Trucks still dropped off steel pipes at the loading dock. Bill Stinnett, a die-hard Indiana Pacers fan, still cut them into pieces. The pieces still went to the “turning” department, where they were honed into rings as small as a bracelet or as...

WASHINGTON, Oct 10 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said he has prepared an "economic-development" measure that would punish companies that globally outsource jobs. The bill would provide economic incentives for companies, Trump said in an interview published on Tuesday, and reward firms that maintain jobs in the United States, and deliver punitive measures against those that move operations offshore. "It's both a carrot and a stick," Trump said. "It is an incentive to stay. But it is perhaps even more so - if you leave, it's going to be very tough for you to think that you're going to...

GOP Senators Roy Blunt and Jerry Moran have introduced legislation which would outsource another 125,000 white-collar jobs to foreigners each year. The outsourcing bill is being pitched as a pro-technology, pro-entrepreneurship bill even though many young and middle-aged Americans in the two Senators’ home states of Missouri and Kansas are already working with technology or as entrepreneurs. The outsourcing bill is dubbed the “Startup Act,” and it closely models prior bills sought by the high-tech sector, where executives and investors are working to raise profits by further reducing the salaries paid to American college graduates and technology experts.

US defence firms offering to set up production lines in India to win deals worth billions of dollars want stronger assurances they won't have to part with proprietary technology, according to a business lobby group's letter to India's Defence Minister. These companies are also saying they shouldn't be held liable for defects in products manufactured in collaboration with local partners under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Make-in-India's drive to build a military industrial base. Lockheed Martin and Boeing are both bidding to supply combat jets to India's military, which is running short of hundreds of aircraft as it retires Soviet-era MiG...

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said so-called “chain migration,” a term often used to refer to citizens or permanent residents sponsoring relatives or the clustering of certain immigrants in the same areas, cannot be included in any immigration legislation. “CHAIN MIGRATION cannot be allowed to be part of any legislation on Immigration!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

A re-imagining of Steven J. Cannell’s 1981 cult classic The Greatest American Hero is flying back to development with a new creative team, a big new commitment and a big twist. ABC has given a put pilot commitment to the half-hour single-camera project. In it, the unlikely (super)hero at the center — Ralph Kinley (played by William Katt) in the original series — is Meera, an Indian-American woman. The Greatest American Hero comes from Fresh Off the Boat writer-producer Rachna Fruchbom and Nahnatchka Khan’s Fierce Baby. 20th Century Fox TV, where Fierce Baby is based and Fruchbom recently signed an...

At the Netroots Nation conference in Atlanta, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the darling of the progressive Left, was blunt and straightforward in her vision of the party. They’re in a rut because they’re not left wing enough and further left is where they should go. Ever since the 2016 primaries, the Warren/Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wing of the party has become more vocal, more active, and completely blinded with rage over Donald Trump’s 2016 win. Many are saying the moderate, centrist path that kept Bill Clinton in the White House for two terms is over, and that Jon Ossoff, who...

Salaries have risen in places like South Asia, making outsourcing there less of a bargain. In addition, as brands pour energy and money into their websites and mobile apps, more of them are deciding that there is value in having developers in the same time zone. For years, U.S. companies have been saving money by “offshoring” jobs — hiring people in India and other distant cubicle farms. Today, some of those jobs are being outsourced again — in the United States. Nexient, a software outsourcing company, reflects the evolving geography of technology work. It holds daily video meetings with one...

(Caption:) Microsoft stamped "Manufactured in Portland, OR, USA" on the Surface Hub (which has actually been made in Wilsonville.) Now, production is apparently moving to China.(Microsoft photo) Just two years ago, Microsoft cast its Wilsonville factory as the harbinger of a new era in American technology manufacturing.The tech giant stamped, "Manufactured in Portland, OR, USA" on each Surface Hub it made there. It invited The New York Times and Fast Company magazine to tour the plant in 2015, then hired more than 100 people to make the enormous, $22,000 touch-screen computer.But last week Microsoft summoned its Wilsonville employees to...

Unless you live in a deep-blue state or congressional district, hypocrisy is not something you want to have to revisit during a re-election campaign. For red state Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana, he should be preparing his defense because this is going to be used against him by the time his 2018 re-election campaign kicks into high gear. The senator has tried to portray himself as a hardcore fighter of this byproduct in free trade but seems to have profited from it through investments with the family arts and crafts business (via Associated Press) [emphasis mine]: An Indiana senator...

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary John Kelly has promised the big business lobby tens of thousands of cheaper, blue-collar foreign workers despite President Donald Trump’s ‘Hire American’ initiative. During a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kelly told Senators that he was lobbied by the financial and open borders lobby to expand the H-2B visa, and also by pro-American worker groups who see the visa as a detriment to Americans’ wages and job opportunities. “They’re caving to the business interest, rather than the people that elected them,” pro-American lawyer John Miano told Breitbart Texas. “Everyone but the very top...

• IBM, Amazon, SoftBank, and Alibaba all made high-profile pledges to create U.S. jobs • Progress has been mixed, with Amazon hiring the most so far. The first few weeks of Donald Trump's presidency were flooded with jobs announcements with a common theme: bringing jobs back to America. Now, 100 days into the Trump administration, where are those jobs? What positions have been filled and which companies have followed up with real hiring? While some companies were eager to provide big, tweetable numbers a few months ago, progress has been a little slower. For example: IBM. Shortly after the election...

CNN says automation is to blame for America’s manufacturing job losses; and what’s worse, there’s more to come—and no, it has absolutely nothing to do with bad trade deals like NAFTA, nor China’s predatory trading strategy. Nope. Nothing to see here people. Move along. Automation is bad, and your jobs are never coming back. This view was echoed recently by the Guardian too. Of course, this is all just fake news—CNN has to earn its reputation somehow. In reality, automation is only half the story: if you look at its impact relative to output, you’ll see that automation doesn’t really...

North Korea briefly reclaimed the global press' attention again by claiming to have tested a hydrogen bomb. While coverage focused on whether that was an exaggeration, the press missed a much more important question: Was this test only for Kim Jong-Un or was it also for the Iranian regime? The North Korean and Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs should be seen as a single entity, as should be their shared cyber warfare programs. The advance of one is an advance of the other. Differences in their activity should be seen as a common-sense division of labor. Gordon Chang, a...

people are under the impression that manufacturing jobs are only moving in one direction: offshore. While many corporations are shifting certain jobs overseas to reduce manufacturing costs, there’s a lot more to the story. In reality, there are many businesses that have been making strenuous efforts to bring jobs back to the United States, a phenomenon known as the reshoring movement. Want to learn more about reshoring in the United States? Keep reading to see which U.S. companies have brought the most jobs back to the states, plus more information on this important new movement. Companies reshore jobs in part...

President Donald Trump has picked an economic advisor who believes in growing the nation’s economy by importing workers and consumers, and by expanding free-trade outsourcing, despite Trump’s “buy American, hire American” campaign promises. Kevin Hassett is slated to become chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors if he is approved by the Senate’s banking committee. If Hassett is confirmed, that will be a win for the corporatist, business-first faction in Trump’s White House, which fights for influence in the Oval Office against the populist, America-first faction that helped Trump win the election in November.

There will be no immediate overhaul or reforms to the H-1B foreign guest worker visa program, according to White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.