Exporting Jobs

 

This global village thang may not hang well in everyone’s closet. Instead of competing for jobs with locals, or even just ‘Mericans, many are now discovering that their skills can be matched in other countries for much less than prevailing wages in the USofA. And this isn’t limited to the manufacturing sector. As Bob Herbert reported in the Times, a lot of middle-level people at companies like IBM are going to find themselves on the wrong side of a pink slip with a return address in China, India and other distant locales.

For a long time, assembly lines have been shut down across the United States and transported or rebuilt in the third world, where people get paid less for a day’s work than we demand for an hour. Then companies realized they could migrate their telephone support services to English-speaking countries, providing they could train the techs to be intelligible to most callers. And now more specifics tasks are being relocated abroad.

Observes Herbert, this practice of outsourcing has been going on for decades now; the point is that the process is accelerating. He quotes the chief international economist for the AFL-CIO as saying, "Anything that is not nailed to the floor is being considered for outsourcing." What this means is that if what you do can be done elsewhere, it can probably be done for less money, and with the bottom line in our bottom-line capitalist society being the bottom line, you might think about another line of work.

The questions this transformation raises are very significant, and made more so by the speed with which it is taking place ,and the current lack of impediments to its continuing and expanding. For instance, are Americans generally overpaid, are corresponding furriners generally underpaid, and where in the middle does it become cost-effective to keep the jobs at home?

Another question is whether it matters to the nation as a whole if jobs are shifted overseas? Of course, the number and types of jobs would be an issue -- hiring Pakistanis to handle our nuclear weapons research wouldn’t be a good plan -- and also what it means to our country with what could be a massive disinvestment of money as salaries in this country and a less massive but significant investment of money as salaries in other countries. Depending on the numbers, it could upend an already upended balance of trade deficit.

Other questions, on a social level, include what obligations companies have to pay higher costs than they have to, what rights American workers have to American capital, and what kind of premium are American consumers willing to pay for made-in-the-USA? If you vote for Bush again, you’ll find out that the answer to these last three questions is "none."

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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