New threat to skilled U.S. workers

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003668844_harrop17.html

New threat to skilled U.S. workers

The master plan, it seems, is to move perhaps 40 million high-skill American jobs to other countries. U.S. workers have not been consulted.

Princeton economist Alan Blinder predicts that these choice jobs could be lost in a mere decade or two. We speak of computer programming, bookkeeping, graphic design and other careers once thought firmly planted in American soil. For perspective, 40 million is more than twice the total number of people now employed in manufacturing.

Blinder was taken aback when, sitting in at the business summit in Davos, Switzerland, he heard U.S. executives talk enthusiastically about all the professional jobs they could outsource to lower-wage countries. And he's a free trader.

What America can do to stop this is unclear, but it certainly doesn't have to speed up the process through a government program. We refer to the H-1B visa program, which allows educated foreigners to work in the United States, usually for three years. Many in Congress want to nearly double the number of H-1B visas, to 115,000 a year.

To the extent that the program helps talented foreign graduates of U.S. universities stay in this country while they await their green cards, it performs a useful service. But for many companies, the visa has become just a tool for transferring American jobs offshore.

Ron Hira has studied the dark side of the H-1B program. A professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he notes that the top applicants for visas are outsourcing companies, such as Wipro Technologies of India and Bermuda-based Accenture.

The companies bring recruits in from, say, India to learn about American business. After three years here, the workers go home better able to interact with their U.S. customers.

In other cases, companies ask their U.S. employees to train H-1B workers who then replace them at lower pay. "This is euphemistically called, 'knowledge transfer,' " Hira says. "I call it, 'knowledge extraction.' "

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The COOL people had their jobs outsourced last year. The only people left to be outsourced are losers.

:-)

When we were losing our jobs, I asked the big manager who was in town a question. Who's going to buy our products if even the employees can't afford them? He said that most people will move into something new so it won't affect sales down the road, and it will raise the standard of living in other countries and they'll start buying our stuff too.

Right.

how will they fess up and apologize?

For real globalization, country barriers need to disappear. Ditto for the cost of the goods; India and China can afford the cost of living the corporate elite want to pay. Americans currently cannot even begin to.

There is a problem here. America's cost of living has to match the wages being offered or the imbalance and decline of America will continue.

Or what am I missing?

But if you want to be able to move manufacturing and service jobs around the world, you have to have competition for the lowest pay.

We offer X an hour!
We only offer Y an hour!
We only offer Y an hour, AND they don't have protections forcing us to pay them!
We offer Z an hour, no limit on hours, AND no limit on age. We'll hire 12 year olds!

When our wages fall because the only jobs that are left are service jobs, unions can't exist. People can't fight for better when nobody will offer better and nobody can afford to pay better.

It's a super way to stock a volunteer only military.

Also, convince Americans to fight for the people who they think destroyed their livelihoods.

Okay, the above line is silly.

But the following one isn't nearly so silly:

Margaret Thatcher spoke the line that many seem to bow toward: "There is no such thing as a society. Only individual men, women, and families." Given that others aren't going to help 'anyone else', is 'anyone else' going to help them by going out and dying for them? Maybe THAT is why enlistment rates are so low and friendly fire 'accidents' so high. :tinfoilhat:

If you have any prospects, you're not likely to volunteer for the military. You will be paid better by staying out. You either have to want the job, or have few alternatives.

Friendly fire incidents are going to happen. Put a lot of young people with emotions and fears in a bad situation, surrounded by people who don't speak their language, thousands of miles from home, feed them crap, give them little sleep, arm them to the teeth and watch what happens.

You can stock your army in three ways.

1: Pay well enough that people consider it worth the risk to sign up.
2: Push patriotism and service.
3: Create a financial situation where few have any other ways of supporting their family.

#1 isn't happening, and we both know that.
#2 is the current method of filling the ranks.
#3 is what's coming.

If people are too busy worrying about life to wonder who put their life in that condition through predatory laws and practices, they won't realize that they're fighting for the people who did it to them.

Free (but unfair) trade is not free, but very costly to labor and its standard of living.

It's free for certain people to crush all that oppose them. It's not free for the person who just wants to sell their goods at market.

If you can't compete because somebody legitimately does it cheaper, it's time to specialize or move on.

If you can't compete because somebody paid the government to block you, it's another story.

Nor the cost to keep replacing them because they're of such shit quality in the first place.

And why won't more Americans start their own small businesses?

As for India, they're snubbing their nose at America by allying with Iran with that pipeline deal. Why the hell are we still dealing with them?

... and "ownership" (a legal fiction - entitlement - created by public law and public law enforcement) is winning. "Big Time," as Cheney would say.

As soon as "knowledge workers" became aware of the possible freedoms and environmentally-friendly possibility of working from home, the "ownership" saw the possibility that those "homes" could be anywhere on the planet ... and they didn't have to kowtow to the nuisance of American labor laws (despite the fact that American laws were the very source of the entitlements they treat the same way as the "divine right of Kings.")

I believe it went something like this:

Monkey is in a cage with two buttons. One gives food at will, the other, cocaine at will. Water is present always.

If I recall correctly, many of the test group of monkeys starved because they couldn't stop pushing the coke button.

Even if I have the facts wrong about this experiment, this experiment as I describe itcorrectly illustrates the conundrum for the Loyal Bushie Class as they dismantle the post-WWII USA economically.

Loyal Bushies are high, stoned, coked to the gills on money and power, as are the rest of the top 0.5% in this country. They KNOW, somewhere in their power-stoned brains, that once we serfs can no longer afford to buy their crap, they have no market.

Perhaps they are considering the emerging Indian and Cinese middle-classes or something, but either way, long-term impoverishment of your tax base is not smart policy.

But they are dreaming, some unconsciously, some consciously, of a return to the pre-1776 condition for serfs (and aristocracy) even if by another name and through the backdoor, where they have to keep lying about the freedom we will no longer have.

And the Imperial Bush Family are their dreams brought to life.

is co-sponsoring the bill that will double the number of H-1B.

Of that I agree with Republicans with.

Ted Kennedy has NOT been a friend of corporate employees --- despite what people may think here on DU.

In the manner of Lou Dobbs on CNN, who are the members in Congress that are really populist friends of middle class working Americans and not in the hip pocket of other interests?

I'm sure there are some, but I can't think of any names off hand.

Miller fought for worker protections in the Pension Protection Act. Unfortunately, he lost.

Thanks for nothing, Ted.

An aged, trust-funded junkie with a life long morphine habit....knows it's destructive but just can't stop.

I can remember reading an article from some 15-20 years ago where they said that the threat to the USA would not come militarily but from economic espionage where other countries would steal our intellectual property.

That philosophy obviously was published before the new world order and the greedy globalist corporatists without any nationalism or loyalty to country were turned into treasonous traitors to the USA.

These companies didn't develop all this intellectual property on their own and in a vacuum. They developed it with government subsidies, using USA infrastructure and US educated employees, etc. They owe the USA.

The one issue that the Democratic Party should make as their own is a movement to prevent the offshore and privatize of that which was paid for by all US taxpayers. I'm not at all confident that even the Democratic candidates will make this a priority to put US interests first. Americans want to restore the middle class of the USA even if it means such common sense approaches as adding tax penalties to corporations that move production or headquarters off shore for the purpose of reimporting with cheaper labor.

REWARDS the pirates with jobs while pissing on American workers.

Real bright signal there, Bill.

These anti-piracy companies, for offshoring a single job, lost their credibility.

There are many solutions that won't kill off America or its middle class while globalizing. The elite are too greedy; that's the problem.

I decided this was insensitive and deleted.

Oh dear... I hope that isn't the case... :wow:

:hi:

quite clear, but the odds are we won't.

We have to take our power back from those that have misused it. Time is growing short and if we wait much longer it will be too late, but there is still a window of opportunity to stop this process.

We are still an irreplaceable market, the mega-corporations cannot exist without us to buy their crap, but this is being fixed as we speak. The next markets are the Indian and Chinese, and their emerging "middle class" is the target. Once they've achieved critical mass (become large enough to be self-sustaining), the companies will abandon this country, leaving us broke, drowning in insurmountable debt, with no means to get out.

The solution is for us to cancel/withdraw from all of the alphabet soup of treaties and organizations that are killing us, none of them can exist without our support. Fix our education system, secure our borders by eliminating the motivation to cross them illegally, take our economic system back from the thieves that have stolen it, and put some sanity into our immigration policies.

"There is class war and my class, the ruling class, is clearly winning" - Warren Buffet

In 2007 we are still the biggest market in the world. Do we use that power to negotiate from a position of strength and bring other producing countries into line with our philosophies such as equivalent labor laws and environmental, etc. that would level the playing field and make the world a better place? Hell no.

We sell out everything that we have so that US headquartered multi-national corporations can make more profits while screwing the country. Clinton helped with NAFTA. We need to rescind every trade treaty and get out of the WTO and go independent.

Lou Dobbs appears to be one of the few that is passionate about this. The others are in bed with the globalist cartel. The Democratic Party must begin to make as their priority issues the economic future of the USA and the middle class.

in the alternative bank that the South American countries have formed (can't remember the name right now).

Lou Dobbs maybe a lot of things we don't particularly care for, but he is a patriot in the true sense.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/patriot">A person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion.

:yourock:

Finally-- something we CAN do -- the OP says what Americans can do is not clear....... some here note that the assumptions of the Davos class is that they will have other markets to replace this one to buy their crap....... but not quite yet.........


DON'T GIVE THEM ANY MORE OF YOUR MONEY THAN YOU HAVE TO. STOP BUYING CORPORATE, OUTSOURCED, SLAVELABOR CRAP.

Don't support the screwing of America in the corporate marketplace while they build up replacement workforces -- and CONSUMERS!!!!!

:patriot:


edit for sp, but "there crap" really is the point, in't it? :evilgrin:

Do they truly believe, that somehow, it will not be them, and their precious children, that will suffer? Are we really that stupid?

Another aspect is the common attitude that it's All or Nothing. There's a tendency to take the idea "Don't give them any more of your money" and ignore the "than you have to." There are many ways to go about it-- as many as there are different situations and individuals. We all do what we can.... Unfortunately it's common for folks to think there's nothing they can do or their individual action won't make any difference anyway so what the hell................

Also, folks don't seem to accept that they CAN be replaced as consumer base.

a middle class that achieves "critical mass" (that would be quite an achievement in two nonwhite nations that represent a third of the world's population), I can't agree that we should withdraw from international treaties and organizations.

You are talking, I think, about NAFTA, WTO, GATT, etc, but others may prefer to withdraw from the UN or never join (under our next, Democratic, president, the Kyoto Treaty. None of them can exist, at least not effectively, without the participation of the US. I don't believe in a post-WWI type isolationism, when we refused to join the League of Nations. We need to interact with the rest of the world and that interaction should be governed by international treaties, whether they are economic (the WTO), political (the UN), scientific (Kyoto), military (ABM) or any other sphere.

All treaties should be kept up-to-date and revised from time to time, but we should not pull into an American shell and cancel our international treaties.

not mean withdrawing from the world. It is obvious that we must engage with the rest of the world, we couldn't withdraw if we wanted to. The problem with every single one of these agreements is that they were written/created by the wrong people for the wrong reasons to achieve the wrong results.

Take the IMF as an example, all of the chaos and human suffering in Africa is directly attributable to this gang of thugs. They operate just like the mafia,
(remember the line from Goodfellas?

They buried these countries under crushing debt that they have no way to pay back to force the government to sell their nations assets and resources to the member corporations at less than pennies on the dollar, they never reach a break-even point because the whole idea is to keep them from ever paying the loans back. It is simply bald-faced, international extortion.

There is no way to "fix" this, it is not, and has never been, what it is advertised to be, the only solution is to dump it and create a new system to achieve what needs to be done.

The other examples we're talking about have just the same problems, they were written and created solely by those in a position to exploit the problems they are supposed to address. Clinton's "side deals" to get NAFTA through the congress, were pathetically weak attempts to address the inherent unfairness of the agreement, but what few were made, are unenforceable and universally ignored by all parties.

H-1(b) visas are another example, good idea on the face, but the government only listens to one side when making the decisions, and big surprise here, all they accomplished was to destroy entire professions and discourage millions of kids from pursuing their interests. ("why should I spend years of my life and thousands of dollars going to school so that I can be laid off and end up working for little more than minimum wage just so I can pay back the money I borrowed to get my worthless degree, like my parents are doing).

Sick, sad, sad.

And those of us who say anything about it are called luddites or worse by the pro"globalization" crowd. How bad does it have to get before peope get pissed about this?

How bad does it have to get before there is a SOLID DEMOCRATIC CONSENSUS against all "trade agreements" and tax policies that destroy US jobs?


ARRGGHH!

When in reality it has been going on for over ten years now. Computer programmers, gone, off to India or China. Graphic designers, hah, I should know, I was one. That too has gone to India, about six years ago. Now we're looking at radiologists and X-ray techs going away, along with any other job not nailed down. Hell, I'm starting a new career as a teacher, and now I hear that education might be outsourced via "distance learning":eyes:

There are only two ways that this is going to stop, a massive popular revolt, or to start outsourcing CEO jobs. Until one of those happens, we're all in for a world of hurt.

Not literally global in the same sense as today, but whatever "known" worlds were out there, it's the same process.

"a massive popular revolt"

I think we have to change the process, not just popularize it. A revolt to do what? We need to figure out a point before it becomes popular, let alone massive.

Figure out what the rich need & want & then start a business to provide it. :eyes:

My husband & I make a fraction of what we made 6 years ago. Fortunately, we did not ramp up our life styles so we manage, but it is discouraging to realize that years of training & education only paid off for a few years before our tech jobs were outsourced. Neither of us even considers looking for work in the tech sector. We are considering places like Costco with the hope that there will be health benefits.

America -- Exporting the best jobs in the world!!

and they will have a firmly middle-class standard of living...

Anyone can do the math...

Half the new ones in my town went to medical school in the Philippines. No career field is safe. Can't afford to go to school or wait until schools have openings, so they bring medical professionals in from other countries. Then get pissed off at low income people for being poor. :crazy:

Just think how much we could save by outsourcing all the CEO's ,VP's, etc. No rreason we need to use US based people for these jobs.

:kick: