If "outsourcing" transfers wealth from the U.S. to third world countries, is this bad?

Do you believe that just because you live in the United States, you are entitled to a high=paying job while billions of people live in the third world on $2 a day and starve?

Yes, more jobs are available in third world countries as a result of outsourcing, but many of those "jobs" are hardly more than slave labor -- kids working 12 hours a day in sweatshops for pennies a day, making shoes and garments to be exported to the US. Those same jobs in the US mostly used to be good union jobs, but now they're gone, and the workers who used to have them end up working at Wal-Mart, selling the cheap crap made by the child sweatshop workers. The wealth goes to the owners of the corporations -- not to the poor workers and not to the American workers who don't have good jobs any more. Nobody is better off other than the CEOs.

There is no net gain from outsourcing for anybody but the corporations. There are better ways to help poor countries than by exploiting their workers. In any event, seems to me that this country's policy should be, first, to help its own people instead of pushing them closer and closer to third world status. Pretty soon, if the corporate-owned Republicans have their way, all of us, not just poor kids in Bangladesh, will be working in sweatshops.

who would vehemently disagree with that. Yes, many millions of people in the third world are better off. And those in the countries that have embraced free trade are by and large doing better than those that came late to the game.

Unlike Russia, personal wealth has exploded in China and India as a direct result of WTO policies. It is not evenly distributed, but an entire middle class has been formed. Nobody who has seen it or experienced can deny it.

There are parts of the population that have lost ground. It is not an easy question. The governments do not always have their citizens' best interests in mind. But it is infinitely better to what came before.

Read "One World, Ready or Not" by William Greider. His progressive credentials are impeccable. But as an honest reporter on economic issues, he has struggled to find the right ground between laissez-faire and closed societies.

And as corporations go private even the opportunity to participate as investors/owners is denied other Americans.

according to some commentators they are no longer 3rd world countries.

To answer your question, I believe our obligation is to
our own people first. Depriving our own is not exactly
the most moral thing to do. When we have reached 3rd
World status ourselves--what was the good. They no longer
have us to depend on.

It is time to be patriotic about something other than war.

Wealthy Americans aren't sweating it. This is the problem.

don't make me laugh. It is not the people in India that want my job, it's the corporations that want to give them my job so they can use and abuse them, and their environment, while raking in the dough for more mergers and acquisitions.

clog our courts with pointless lawsuits or their products damage citizens and those suits screw up our courts.

You assume that multinationals have only done good in the US or third world countries. Hardly the case.

should ever starve. The obscenely, filthy rich believe they are entitled to all the wealth available in the world and as a result Americans lose their decent paying jobs and slave wage countries provide their citizens to criminal corporate america to be abused and paid $2.00 a day. Outsourcing transfers wealth into the pockets of criminal corporate executive management, wall street traitors and their greedy enabling investors. Equitable distribution of wealth throughout the world would be possible if it weren't for the elitist, filthy, greedy rich.

by Senator Byron Dorgan

How Corporate Greed and Brain-Dead Politics Are Selling Out America (Hardcover)
http://www.amazon.com/Take-This-Job-Ship-Brain-Dead/dp/031235522X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-5280590-1331303?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182560776&sr=8-2

it's criminal.

BUT if THIS government is giving MY MONEY (in the form of tax breaks) to the companies sending the jobs overseas, then THAT makes it my business and I object.
My taxes are MY investment in THIS country.
Our country has traditionally helped out other countries in the way of foreign aid not in sending them our jobs. Let those governments take the foreign aid and develop jobs for their own.

...are disproportionately having their wealth shipped elsewhere, where it (in fact) doesn't actually do much to enrich people in the bottom quintiles THERE. In fact, it tends to migrate from the bottom three quintiles there AND here to the top one-tenth of one percent there and here.

This is not a good thing.

decidedly,
Bright

if you give up everything you own that was made in China by outsourced labor. :o

Oligarchy isn't pretty.

with the ultra wealthy picking up the difference.

Because the currency exchange is lopsided with the third world, a worker who is paid enough to live on will only look like he's paid two bucks a day because of currency exchange. In his own currency, he has a roof over his head, food to eat, clothing, basic care when he gets sick, and even some left over for films and other small luxuries. When you change his paycheck into dollars, it comes out to two dollars.

Two dollars a day won't provide enough calories in the US to a man who lives under a bridge.

OURS DROP.

Gee, I don't know.

• Is it bad when you lose your job to offshoring due to greedy republinazis?

• Is it bad when you no longer have access to medical care b/c you lost your job?

• Is it bad when you can't buy food to put on your table?

• Is it bad when you can't pay your rent & become homeless?

:eyes:

They transfer the job, pay a fraction of the prior wage, and keep the wealth. In the short term it may help the foreign worker, but in the long run he is being exploited even more than the American he replaced.