Outsourcing steals American jobs

“First-Generation American's Job Taken By His Father
READING, PA—Miguel Martinez, 48, who immigrated to the U.S. 30 years ago, last week lost his leather-cutting job at GST AutoLeather, Inc. to his 66-year-old father Roberto. "I came to this country in 1974 to make a better life for my family," Martinez said Monday. "But in December, they moved the factory where I've been working for 22 years down to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. I love my father, but that goddamn beaner stole my job." Martinez's $18-an-hour duties will now be performed by his father for $7 a day.”

“Source?”

“I'm waiting for the study to come out where it shows that all these tax benefits that BIG COMPANIES are recieveing, are producing jobs, just not here. Sure, the stock market may be up, and businesses are slightly doing better, but no jobs are being created HERE. Take a look at the boom of the internet, and all the jobs that were created because of it. many of those tech jobs are now overseas. My buddy who is a tekkie at Motorola said he had over 200 people in his web and systems department in 2000. Now there are FIVE! FIVE? I asked how can that be? It turns out they laid off those folks, and now contract out the jobs to tech firms overseas (India, Poland etc.). I'm so glad to see all these tax breaks for Big Businesses so they can create all these new jobs...... in Europe and Asia!”

“January 13, 2004 | Daily Mislead Archive
Bush Twice Tries to Mislead America About the Economy in 24 Hours


Within a span of 24 hours, President Bush twice attempted to mislead the American people about the economy and his tax policies. On Friday, the president said, "Unemployment dropped today to 5.7% [which] is a positive sign that the economy is getting better."1

But the president didn't add that the unemployment drop occurred not because the economy was getting better, but because continued weak job growth led 309,000 people to stop looking for work.2 As one nonpartisan economist said, "Most of these dropouts would still be in the labor force working or trying to work if the economy were doing better," The president made no mention that only 1,000 total jobs were created in December - a "shockingly low number," where most economists had expected job growth to be around 100,000 to 150,000 for the month.3 33 months after the beginning of the recession, this recovery is distinguished from all previous cycles of job contraction and resumed growth since 1939, according to the Economic Policy Institute, for not having fully recovered job levels to those above the pre-recessionary peak within 31 months from its start.

The following day, the president touted the same economic policies that helped create the unemployment crisis. Despite the bad economic news, he said, "Tax relief has got this economy going again," and bragged, "every American who pays income taxes got a tax cut."4 His use of the phrase "income tax," however, was tailored to divert attention from the millions of low-income American taxpayers (who pay payroll tax but not income tax) who received nothing. Bush's 2001 tax cut completely excluded 31% of all families in America.5 Similarly, Bush's 2003 tax cut completely excluded 31% of all taxpayers6 - including one million children of military families.7

Sources:
President Speaks with Women Small Business Owners on the Economy, 01/09/2004.
"Falling jobless figure deceptive", Baltimore Sun, 01/10/2004.
"Changes in U.S. work force make accurate data elusive", International Herald Tribune, 01/13/2004.
President's Radio Address, 01/10/2004.
Bush Tax Plan Offers No Benefits to One in Three Families, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 02/07/2001.
Bush 2003 Tax Plan a Big Fat Zero for a Third of Nation’s Taxpayers Percentages with no tax cut are much higher in poorer states, Citizens for Tax Justice, 01/27/2003.
One Million Military Children Left Behind by Massive New Tax Package, Children's Defense Fund, 06/06/2003.”

“The Onion!”

“ah.

ha ha ha ha


really.


ha”

“There aren't a lot of one nation corporations anymore. As for losing jobs b/c they went oversea's - does any one work for Toyota? Mercedes? SONY?”

“LMAO dayhiker - the term "beaner" should have tipped me off!

bearmagnet - you mean Japanese companies? Japan, who is the beneficiary of a huge trade defecit with us? How many Indian and Polish companies have plants in the USA? I wonder what our trade defecit is with them?”

“Yeah, we need more products like the Yugo.”

“Hell, you can't even strap a full sized deer to the hood of a Yugo, who the heck would want that?”

“I figured the coincidence of father stealing sons job would have been the tip.”

“You can thank NAFTA for alot of these companies moving their operations to Mexico. Just about killed the textile industry in South Carolina, for example.”

“Same here in Alabama.”

“Does it matter, BB? Or are you just discussing companies that go to the 3rd world for its cost effectiveness? Can we make a distinction? Isn't it saying a Global economy has advantages and disadvantages? What doesn't?”

“OTOH, Honda's new plant is a 20 minute drive from my community and the only Mercedes plant (or maybe it's just the first Mercedes plant) outside the US is about an hours drive from my community. There is a Hyundai plant 2 hrs away and a Fiat plant maybe 30 minutes away.”

“Mercedes is Benz is BMW is Chrysler. They're all interconnected. Hyundai partners with the Japanese. I think Fiat is with Renault/Nissan and/or an "American" Company.

BTW - If you don't like jobs going to Mexico then stop buying PT Cruisers, all are made in Mexico!”

“I know, but this plant was built in about '94, way before the linkup with Chrylser. That's why I refered to it that way. At the time, it was huge. All M-class vehicles are built outside Tuscaloosa, AL. The plant has doubled in size in about 10 years.”

“"Does it matter, BB? Or are you just discussing companies that go to the 3rd world for its cost effectiveness? Can we make a distinction? Isn't it saying a Global economy has advantages and disadvantages? What doesn't?"
bearmagnet
01:52:01 PM

Any country that has extremely poor worker's rights will be a bigger competitor for manufacturing jobs, obviously. The solution is to disallow businesses to move jobs to countries without a minimum worker's rights commitment.”

“That isn't even a realistic solution. Who decides what defines a "minimum worker's right commitment?" Our government? That'll work.”

“No, we pressure the WTO into defining worker's rights, and enforcing compliance through trade tarriffs.

We already do this with financial rules, why can it not extend to worker laws, in order to define a place for our economy in the future?”

“I should add that I agree to the principal of the matter”

“I don't see it as unrealistic, but it WOULD take a leader that was not primarily beholden to multinational big business.”

“Speaking of being beholden, did you see last nights "The West Wing?" Pretty good episode. I only caught the last half of it. Kiddies bed time routine ran late last evening.”

“Is that a good show? I've never watched it.”

“You would be shocked to discover how many small to medium sized businesses outsource work.”

“Are you serious? It's very left, I figured you were into it.

In the episode the discussion was about commuting sentences of people who had gotten tied up in minimum sentences. Basically, they were trying to commute the sentences of 3 people who had unreal sentences from relatively "minor" crimes. They had to go from 36 to 3 and couldn't do it. They decided to be bold and do all 36. It turned out that 1 family came to talk to them and they were major contributors to the Colorado Dem committee. The last name was different, so they really didn't make the connection until the family showed up on the doorstep. They decided that the press would connect the dots and they'd get roasted so they commuted 35 of them. At the end of the episode they get a call that #36 had hung his self in jail.”

“"No, we pressure the WTO into defining worker's rights, and enforcing compliance through trade tarriffs.

We already do this with financial rules, why can it not extend to worker laws, in order to define a place for our economy in the future?"


Ah yes. Impose our Will on the rest of the World through yet more economic threats. The WTO is an arm of the US? One World under us!”

“I'll bet that's especially true with what you do HPM. It's becoming true with what I do.”

“Are you advocating letting another society use it's influence in place of ours?

Or are you advocating the status quo, allowing workers to be misused by their governments while we reward them repeatedly with manufacturing and service contracts until such point as the US must choose between quality of life and global competitiveness?

What exactly is your stance?”

“That last was for Bearmagnet.”

“It’s not just the lack of worker’s rights laws that appeal to large manufactures. Think about the environmental laws that are in place in this country vs. a third-world country such as Mexico.”

“Somewhere in the twilight zone?

Should workers be abused? No? Should we enforce our ideals on another country? No. Do we care about workers rights in other countries? Only if it doesn't effect profit. Also dependent on how close we are to the current govt.

I think I stand as a pessimist. the more we involve ourselves with the world the more we screw it up.”

“I always felt that there should have been something attached to NAFTA that when an "American" company outsourced to another underdeveloped country they had to satisfy the labor and environmental laws that applied in this country.”

“Very true dayhiker.

Everybody is stuck on the loss of manufacturing and blue collar jobs but the real loss as of late is in tech and white collar work.

We are bleeding at both ends.”

“Uh, okay. I think refusing to trade with, and influencing others to refuse to trade with countries without worker's rights is not only our moral obligation, but good economic sense.

If you consider encouraging human rights as "enforcing our ideals on another country", we have nothing more to discuss.

Lumberzac, you're right. The problem is that there are actually environmental agreements in effect in WTO practice right now. They suck, and need to be beefed up A LOT, but they're there.

To my knowlege, there is no human rights agreement in place, so a country currently refusing to accept trade or placing tarriffs on a country of poor human rights record could be sued for protectionism.”

“Large Engineering office will set up offices in locations at rougly 1/3 points around the globe. They may have a billion dollar power plant to design and will let it get worked on somewhere for 8 hrs and then forward it 8 time zones to the next office and so on so that it gets worked on 24 hrs a day.

Smaller type projects are getting farmed out, but someone still have to have an engineering license to sign off on it to get a permit. Also, someone still has to visit the construction site and make decisions in the field so thats a small amount of insulation. Bubba Q. Contractor wants someone they can look in the eye and someone they can understand when they talk. That helps.”

“From the WTO website:

UNDERSTANDING THE WTO: CROSS-CUTTING AND NEW ISSUES
Labour standards: highly controversial

Strictly speaking, this should not be mentioned here at all because there is no work on the subject in the WTO, and it would be wrong to assume that it is a subject that “lies ahead”. But it has been discussed so extensively, that some clarification is needed. The key phrase is “core labour standards” — essential standards applied to the way workers are treated. The term covers a wide range of things: from use of child labour and forced labour, to the right to organize trade unions and to strike.



Click the + to open an item.


Understanding the WTO

Basics

Agreements

Settling disputes

Cross-cutting and new issues

Regionalism

The environment

Investment etc

Electronic commerce

Labour standards

The Doha agenda

Developing countries

The organization

Abbreviations



More introductory information
> The WTO in Brief
> 10 benefits
> 10 misunderstandings
Trade and labour rights: deferred to the ILO back to top

Trade and labour standards is a highly controversial issue. At the 1996 Singapore Ministerial Conference, WTO members defined the organization’s role more clearly, identifying the International Labour Organization (ILO) as the competent body to deal with labour standards. There is currently no work on the subject in the WTO.

The debate outside the WTO has raised three broad questions.

The legal question: should trade action be permitted as a means of putting pressure on countries considered to be severely violating core labour rights?

The analytical question: if a country has lower standards for labour rights, do its exports gain an unfair advantage?

The institutional question: is the WTO the proper place to discuss labour?

All three questions have a political angle: whether trade actions should be used to impose labour standards, or whether this would simply be an excuse for protectionism.

The WTO agreements do not deal with any core labour standards. But some industrial nations believe the issue should be studied by the WTO as a first step toward bringing the matter of core labour standards into the organization. WTO rules and disciplines, they argue, would provide a powerful incentive for member nations to improve workplace conditions.

Many developing and some developed nations believe the issue has no place in the WTO framework. These nations argue that efforts to bring labour standards into the arena of multilateral trade negotiations are little more than a smokescreen for protectionism. Many officials in developing countries believe the campaign to bring labour issues into the WTO is actually a bid by industrial nations to undermine the comparative advantage of lower wage trading partners.

In the weeks leading up to the 1996 Singapore Ministerial Conference, and during the meeting itself, this was a hard-fought battle. In the end, WTO members said they were committed to recognized core labour standards, and that these standards should not be used for protectionism. The economic advantage of low-wage countries should not be questioned, but the WTO and ILO secretariats would continue their existing collaboration, the declaration said. The concluding remarks of the chairman, Singapore’s trade and industry minister, Mr. Yeo Cheow Tong, added that the declaration does not put labour on the WTO’s agenda. The countries concerned might continue their pressure for more work to be done in the WTO, but for the time being there are no committees or working parties dealing with the issue.”

“Great ideas, don't get me wrong. But, do we impose minimum wages? Based on our standards? Might we wreak havoc on other countries by not taking in the effect of imposing laws that may seem harmless in the short run?”

“Sorry about the crappy cut and paste.

The fact that we have failed, along with the countries of the EU, to demand labor rights among the trading countries is one of the most short-sighted and potientially financially disasterous failures of our time, IMO.”

“Bearmagnet, I think you have a misunderstanding about the function of the WTO. If a member country wants the protections offered by the WTO, it must obey the regulations agreed on by the majority of the members.”

“Our industry (web and info tech) is opaque. The customer has no idea who actually does the work. All they ever see is the project manager.”

“The key in what I do, or accounting, or law, or anything like that is to continue to be a service provider and not to become a commodity. If that happens, you're screwed.”

“Bush announces new Job Creation McCzar

NewsHax wire -- President Bush announced Monday he is creating a new high-level government post to reverse Americas spiraling unemployment trend. According to Bush political advisors, America is hemorrhaging jobs. Most horrifying to Bush's advisors, job losses are mainly occuring in states crucial to Bush's re-election, prompting a real action from the president.

To fill the post, Bush announced the appointment of Ronald
McDonald, whom he touts as being "more responsible for more American jobs than any man, or clown, alive." Bush lauded his choice of Employment Mczar further, saying that "Mr. McDonald is a can-doer and will provide the American people with jobs. He's got job applications with him now in fact. That is plain talk you can take to the bank, along with your $200 paycheck."

Bush later said the creation of his Jobs Mczar because the nation has lost "thousands of jobs in manufacturing." Actually, the the U.S. economy has lost 2.7 million jobs since Bush took office, 2.4 million jobs in manufacturing alone. The downturn has eliminated more than one in 10 of the nation's factory jobs and left Bush holding the possible distinction of being the first president since Hoover to end his term with less jobs than he started it with.

Following standard and time-tested emergency economic procedures, the president blamed the problem on foreigners, citing cheaper labor markets overseas. He suggested that we can bridge the wage gap with the rest of the world by simply creating lower wage jobs. "Once our lost jobs see that our hourly wages are down, they will come running back. I know economics."

Bush press masters later clarified the presidents position, "By creating millions of minimum wage jobs, we will bring average American wages down and then the rest of the world will see us as their cheap labor market. Jobs come back, key election states statistically look better, and we get re-elected by selling our job creation record. Although median wages will only be a fraction
of what they were just 4 years ago because we will replace $20 an hour jobs with $5 an hour jobs, the campaign issue America cares about is more jobs, and if we create more jobs, we win. That's the plain, honest talk America likes to hear."

newshax.com”

“You found me out! I'm completely ignorant of what & how the WTO works. Are my concerns invalidated?”

“I think, if you read a bit about how the WTO works, you might be concerned less about the US using its influence, and more about it not. That's just my opinion, though.”

“remember when the peace corps showed the tribes of Africa how to make & use wood burning stoves? or efficiency sake? Deforestation on a massive scale! Is "interfering" with economic structure any different?”

“Uh, no I don't remember that, and yes, I would consider this different.”

“I wasn't actually around for it either (50's?) :)

I'm just a pessimist whenever we try to improve the 3rd world”

“LMAO Mort!

I think I stand as a pessimist. the more we involve ourselves with the world the more we screw it up."
bearmagnet
02:46:49 PM
01/15/04


I agree bearmagnet.

Anytime you incorporate a team member weaker than the team, you make your team weaker. It's common sense. By argueing that we will be better off in a global economy is the way to go, you must acknowlage the latter. And, you must also ask yourself..... who benefits from this "globalization"?

1.) The foriegn worker? NO Maybe they have a job that makes $1.00 per hour, but they are working under bad conditions, and thier pay may support them now, but they'll never have the same quality of lifestyle that we do.

2.) American workers? NO Decent paying jobs for blue collar employees are becoming a thing of the past, mainly due to the loss of thier jobs to foreigners. The people that lose these jobs have to take lower paying jobs, multiple jobs, and are in debt to thier eyeballs. This trend is also becoming apparent in white collar jobs.

3.) American small businesses - NO. They see loss of revenue when unemployment is up and workers wages are down. People will buy products or services from large companies that can offer cheaper products due to globalization.

4.) Big Business - YES Let's see: cheaper labor force, lack of competition due to price battles with small businesses, subsudies and tax breaks when they can't make a profit, and the investors still come out on top by the end of the day.”

“I read one site about the exporting of America that by 2008 the trade restrictions on Chinese fabrics will be lifted and the market will be taken over by the Chinese. Lou Dobbs had a list on tonight's show about companies that outsource and the boycotting that has started. It also showed software engineers that lost jobs to India for a fraction of the pay at Microsoft. Some websites call this a grand plan to destroy the middle class. I don't know what the plan is or if there is one, but lots of people feel it's time to take some drastic action.”