What jobs? What Recovery?

Well, we are still in an economic "recovery," and it is still a jobless recovery. Or maybe it is a bad job recovery ... or a job flight recovery. The "official" unemployment rate is 5.9%, but when you add in those who have lost their benefits, and those who are marginally employed, the rate is is 9.7% - higher than last year's high of 9.4% ( Jobless Count Skips Millions Streitfeld, LA Times 1229/03).

It is estimated that we will have lost almost 1/2 million white-collar "living wage" jobs to "outsourcing." That means exporting those jobs out of the country. It is estimated that by 2015 over 3 million high skill jobs will have been "exported" (Who's Outsourcing?).

Who is "outsourcing?" A growing list of corporations and states (from Who's Outsourcing?) .
* Accenture
* ACS - Affiliated Computer Services Inc. of Dallas
* American Express
* AIG (American International Group)
* Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld
* AT&T
* Bank of America
* Boeing
* BP
* Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway
* Chase Morgan
* Citibank
* Circuit City
* Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC)
* DaimlerChrysler
* Dell
* Delta Airlines
* The Democratic National Committee
* DuPont
* EDS - Electronic Data Systems Corporation
* Exult, Inc.
* General Electric
* Hewlett-Packard
IBM -
IBM Global Services
* Infosys Technologies
* International Paper
* Intel
* JP Morgan Chase
* Lehman Brothers
* Microsoft
* Nortel
* Oracle
* PeopleSoft
* Procter & Gamble
* Prudential
* The Republican National Committee
* Siebel Systems, Inc.
* TPI
* TRW Automotive
* UTC (United Technologies Corporation)
o Carrier
o Chubb
o Hamilton Sundstrand
o Otis
o Pratt & Whitney
o Skiorsky Aircraft
o UTC Power
* Wipro Technologies

Sending US jobs out of the country has many ramifications.
1 -It takes US workers out of the job market and lowers personal and family income. Because of this, it has the direct effect of eroding the very job bases that support workers.

2- It increases the pressure on services - public and private - from food banks and low income housing, to school lunch programs and social welfare.

3 -It erodes the tax base to provide the very services that become in increasing demand. The lower people's income the less they pay in taxes.

4- The less income people have to spend, the more ripple there are to other businesses who no longer have customers adequate to stay open.

5- Major job exporters have a competitive cost advantage which gives them leverage it wipe out competition. This sets wages and benefits at a lower and lower rate creating even worse employment "opportunities."

Corporations argue that they must outsource to remain competitive, and that outsourcing keeps the cost of goods and services low. One has to ask who they are competing against. Increasingly there are fewer and fewer "competitors." Also as wages erode, fewer folks can afford to "consume" the goods and services.

There is a growing list of information and commentary available out there about this growing trend. Note that many of the sites are anti-outsourcing, but also anti-immigrant. Those two issues seem to be increasingly linked by a number of people. This means that there is a racist tone that sometimes creeps in. Ignored by many is that immigrant workers are being exploited as a low wage controllable resource. Most of the anti-immigrant discussion see immigration as "just another attack on US jobs."

There also seems to be a growing level of news about the issues. My guess is that it may (and should) arise as a Campaign 2004 issue.

A Few Resources

(Who's Outsourcing? is a good site for tracking outsourcing

Offshore Outsourcing World - a blog dedicated to outsourcing. Not kept current, but still some good articles.

CNN Transcript of Lou Dobbs "Exporting America,"

Outsource Congress good collection of articles and videos.

Posted by rowan at December 30, 2003 11:08 PM | TrackBack | [eMail this article!] |