An article I wrote on outsourcing:

Tell me what you think, please-this has already been graded, I just wanted to know what other Democrats thought.

Outsourcing: Un-American Greed

Outsourcing is one of the great scourges of America. Corporations fire their American workers, shift operations overseas, and hire cheap labor in developing Asian countries. Americans who have trained long and hard to do their jobs are left unemployed and the American economy is weakened. This sickening behavior punishes the little man in the name of profit. In addition, it hurts our country by taking away all the basic things people should be relying on American suppliers for and having them manufactured overseas, and sending away service jobs to places like India. Those who support outsourcing argue that it will benefit the global economy, and thus eventually benefit America, but they are wrong. How can weakening the country and shafting the little man be a good thing? The answer is simple: it is not. Outsourcing is wrong, both economically and morally.

The Americans hit hardest by outsourcing are the middle class. There is no way to outsource lower-class jobs like food service and maintenance, and the upper class are the ones responsible for it in the first place. Middle class workers (skilled manufacturers, technology workers, and the like) are the ones who see their livelihoods taken away in the name of profit. According to journalist Lou Dobbs, outsourcing has claimed “an estimated 400,000-500,000 jobs a year” since 2000. That totals up to somewhere between 2 and 2.5 million jobs lost so far. All those people are now scrambling to find a new job, trying desperately to retrain themselves, or succumbing to despair. In a paper similar to this one, University of Southern California student Brian Marquez quoted automotive designer Doug Hill, who lost his job to outsourcing, “I’m done. I know that. Who’s going to hire me? I’m 60. I’m just living one day at a time, and I do a lot of praying."

Leaving people like Mr. Hill jobless in the name of profit is against everything the U.S. stands for. America is supposed to care for its people and protect them from exploitation, not sit idly by and let its citizens see their jobs taken away just so some CEO can rake in even more money each year.

Almost as bad is the way outsourcing affects the country’s future. Colleges are seeing students “shun high-tech fields like computer science…” with a 23% drop in new majors between 2003 and 2004. The reason for this is simple: fear of being unemployed. When corporations can hire someone with a similar skill set in a developing country at a vastly reduced cost, the majority of them will do that rather than hire an American worker, especially one fresh out of college. As University of Southern California student Fiona Torrance states, “when American citizens pay for their education through savings, loans, and grants, and are then denied the opportunity of earning in America because the career opportunity is given to a foreign person, it is a serious ethical issue." Without a sizeable computer technology base, the U.S. will fall behind other nations.

Additionally, outsourcing poses several other problems. For starters, it is far too easy for important information to go astray, resulting in security issues. One example: “last year…an offshore worker in Pakistan threatened to publicly post confidential medical records belonging to the UCSF Medical Center on the internet, unless she was paid." Other countries have worse information-security laws than America does, making prosecution for an offense like the one mentioned above so troublesome that one might as well not bother. One of the largest problems with outsourcing, the morality of hiring Asian laborers trapped in wage slavery, could take up a whole paper by itself. Outsourcing can also lead to a lack of quality control. For some reason, the phrase “made in China” springs to mind here. And sarcasm aside, it is a legitimate complaint. Most products from China and other poor Asian countries are generally lower quality and much more prone to breaking or failing than American goods. Any sort of clothing or other goods besides food sold at a Wal-Mart act as a pretty good example.

To be fair and balanced, one must also look at the arguments for outsourcing. In the Heritage Foundation’s article Ten Myths about Jobs and Outsourcing, its writers make several main claims arguing that outsourcing is a good thing. Their first main claim is that outsourcing is less of a problem since there are more American workers than at any other time in the country’s history. This does not logically follow, since there are also more Americans than at any other point in the nation’s history, and outsourcing is a recent phenomenon that is only going to get worse. Their second main claim is that mass loss of jobs is a myth. They state, “the most alarmist prediction of jobs lost to outsourcing…estimates that 3.3 million service jobs will be outsourced between 2000 and 2015." Well, so far 2.5 million jobs have been lost, and it’s only 2005. That speaks for itself. Their last main claim is that, “as costs decline, every consumer benefits, including those who lose their jobs to outsourcing. Truly, one must wonder what a drug test of these people would show-what, exactly, is contaminating their systems to make them be this foolish? What is worse is that the government is full of people with similar views.

Currently, the federal government is pro-outsourcing. Not surprising, since Bush and his cronies are inextricably linked with major corporations, and those corporations benefit from outsourcing. There are long-standing provisions in the tax code that help make outsourcing as bad a problem as it is. Bush could, and should, have pressured the Republican-dominated Congress to do something about those provisions, since outsourcing became a major problem on his watch, and he chose not to. Had John Kerry been elected, he would have done something about the tax code problem, since he stated
in an interview with Aziz Haniffa, “I'm against a distorted tax code that rewards business leaders for shutting down American factories and laying off American workers… I believe in a trade policy that builds jobs and improves the lives of working men and women."

There is also the problem of stopping outsourcing. The quickest and most effective way to do that-having the leadership of the companies that are the worst offenders assassinated-is, unfortunately, illegal. And while that does not necessarily eliminate it from candidacy, the fact that in order to get the desired effect, the people who are supposed to be intimidated by their colleagues’ deaths would have to know what the killings were for, and that would be impossible to do without getting everyone involved landed in prison for life. Therefore, America must turn to less effective methods. As mentioned above, Kerry would have done his best to convince Congress to revise the tax code to eliminate the benefits that help make outsourcing so profitable. Since he lost the
election and since the Democrats also failed to gain control of Congress, America will have to wait until at least 2006 before anything gets done about outsourcing. That means another 200-250,000 jobs down the drain. Offering incentives to companies who agree not to outsource is another possible approach, but given humanity’s basic greed, incentives may not be enough to overcome the draw of cheap labor.

Looking back, it seems clear that outsourcing is reprehensible. It takes jobs away from hard-working Americans just so big corporations can make more money, thus weakening America’s economy. Almost as bad, it weakens the country’s future by inspiring students to avoid fields prone to outsourcing and leaves those students who do
follow high-risk fields with the potential of having all their hard work and the financing of their education invalidated. Additionally, outsourcing promotes wage slavery, poor quality products or services, and causes security risks. The arguments for it are weak, while there are plenty of reasons to avoid it, or better yet, stop it entirely. However, with the current pro-outsourcing government in control of both the Presidency and Congress, America is not likely to see any efforts against this scourge for at least a year. Another year of 250,000 more U.S. citizens seeing their jobs taken away in the name of the almighty dollar. Another year of more students turning away from at-risk fields, another year of hapless Asians staying trapped in wage slavery, another year of security risks and quality control issues. Another year of unchecked corporate greed.

it is for post like this that the new GDs are needed. A lot of time and work went into it.

There's another-on protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge-that I'll post later tonight.

to abandon the stupid dogma of free trade without any protection for workers in this country, protection for strategic industries (and you find out what those are when you get into a big war and can't import stuff any more), and insistence that workers abroad hired by US companies enjoy the same protections afforded US workers.

It just isn't going to happen. You see, all that consumer junk we used to make for ourselves has been pushed into the third world to keep prices flat so we won't notice the very real inflation over the past 25 yeras and crab for pay hikes.

Look at health care to see where real inflation is. If a person is uninsured, he's effectively priced out of care if he gets sick.

Rich men in both parties are getting far richer as outsourcing pads the bottom lines of corporations and Congressmen see bigger donations coming in as long as they don't kill that particular golden goose.

They'd all rather kill us, apparently.

:sarcasm:

this essay. I would add a couple of other issues: why have countries who are receiving IT outsourced jobs reaped such a benefit?
they have been investing in an educational infrastructure that assures that they will be able to participate at all levels of IT. We have done very little in the way of preparing a generation of students who will become promising computer scientists. Instead, the insecurity of jobs here deters our students from getting into the field.

We have also been outsourcing our hiring for local jobs. In otherwords, we are hiring software engineers from India, Pakistan, etc. to work here. Similarly, we are hiring nurses from the Philippines, Great Britain, etc. to work here. Why? We have a shortage of nurses.

We should be requiring that companies who want to hire from overseas or offshore our service and technical work make a huge contribution to developing schools and training centers in the U.S.

I agree with just about everything that your paper says; but I thought you could have raised a few more issues.

One thing I didn't agree with, you say: The Americans hit hardest by outsourcing are the middle class. There is no way to outsource lower-class jobs like food service and maintenance .... That's largely true today, however, a lot of unskilled jobs - factory jobs - were outsourced over the last 25 years. Today, the US has less of these jobs than it once did, and these once provided a chance for unskilled US workers to earn a decent wage. Today, unskilled workers in the US have less of a chance of climbing out of poverty than at any time since World War II.

Another thing, I think most economists agree with the idea of free trade, and largely due to the Theory of Comparative Advantage. I would have liked to see you take that argument on.

Also, when you take on the arguments from the Heritage Foundation paper, on the 3rd argument, you say: Their last main claim is that, “as costs decline, every consumer benefits, including those who lose their jobs to outsourcing. Truly, one must wonder what a drug test of these people would show-what, exactly, is contaminating their systems to make them be this foolish? .... While I think your question is valid, I would have liked to see you list the reasons why this argument is incorrect, rather than assume that the reader knows the reasons.

Again, I think your paper is good; but since you asked for opinions, I thought I'd tell you the places where I thought the paper could be improved.