I’ll try to keep this post short as my head is still spinning from yesterday’s self-debate. First, congratulations to Obama on killing Osama Bin Laden. Second, now maybe he could work on America’s real enemy number 1: outsourcing.
Instead of bombarding you with statistics you might not believe, I’ll just put what’s happened to America in the form of a word problem. In 1978 an American CEO made 10 million dollars and his hundred thousand factory workers made 50,000, everyone was happy. Then in the 1980’s he began to outsource some of those jobs. Then in the 1990’s he outsourced some more. Then in the 00’s he outsourced over half his workforce to countries with cheaper labor. He saved his company hundreds of millions, pocketed half of that, and today makes 150 million. What happened to the American workers left behind?
Answer: They still make 50,000 a year. A terribly stagnant wage but better than the 9 percent of Americans currently without work today. That figure is easy to dismiss–after years of it in double digits–but let’s put that figure another way: It doesn’t include anyone too old, too sick, too young, or otherwise indisposed who is unemployed. Unemployment only counts the people looking for a job who can’t find one. So that means almost 1 in ten of Americans who are able and willing to work are out of a job and cannot find one.
Where did all those jobs go? Overseas…to our competitors. The last thirty years have been bad ones for the US middle class but China has experienced a boom off collecting all of our jobs and the wages they bring. Their economy is growing, while ours is flatlining. Losing the jobs is bad enough, but losing them to a competitor puts America on track to being replaced as the world’s top economy in as little as 5 years (according to the IMF).
We need more jobs here now. We need more CEOs willing to create them even if it costs a few extra bucks to put jobs in California over China. And we need CEOs to forget about their year end bonuses–the kind they receive by “cutting costs” a sugarcoated term for sending jobs to sweat shops overseas–and put America first. In other words, we need a miracle.
Well said
Well said indeed.
The author has their terminology incorrect. Outsourcing is according to Merriam-Webster a transitive verb meaning : to procure (as some goods or services needed by a business or organization) under contract with an outside supplier . Outsourcing in and of itself is not evil. Everyone outsources, for example we outsource to the farmer, the butcher, the baker, etc. who produces the food we eat, we outsource to the mechanic who repairs our car, the babysitter or daycare center who watches our children and so on. Companies outsource as well (e.g the department store who outsources to an advertising firm or the law office that outsources to a cleaning service.
Off-shoring is the real culprit, whether a corporation sets up it’s own factory overseas and pays what we consider cheap and/or slave labor or contracts it with a third party.
Cheryl: This is, without question, the most worthless comment I have ever received on the site (and I’m including the conservative hate mail I get). Before you respond to what people write you should always ask yourself “Am I SAYING something worth saying rather than just saying it to be talking?”
Outsourcing is a common term for sending jobs overseas–there’s even an extremely broad NBC comedy about it called, you guessed it, Outsourced–that’s the most common term, and it isn’t incorrect because you want to waste five minutes scouring Webster’s Dictionary. I write articles so most people will know what I’m talking about instead of dry, smarty pants lectures no one will read–I’m a funny kind of liberal that way–and if I had written “Off shoring is a Greater Threat to America Than Terrorism” what would that have said? Who would have known exactly what I was talking about (could refer to oil drilling) except for a bunch of business professionals that won’t read the article anyway. In fact, when I posted this article yesterday one company started following me on Twitter that does nothing but show companies how to outsource their labor to cheaper destinations. They did not get that I was taking the position that outsourcing is bad.
I feel like I should tell you now this isn’t a typical liberal site where liberals that love nothing more than to argue over each other in some eternal “Let’s see who’s the smartest contrarian in the room” contest get to waste everyone’s time with never ending hair splitting and sniping about the exact, technical, most precise word to use because no one gives a shit. From where I stand people like that are the dumbest in the room because they don’t get the soul of the argument. They know the lyrics but not the music.