RE: Trade debunking -- MIDRANGE-NONTECH

Just skimmed this
(http://www.midrangeserver.com/tfh/tfh040504-story04.html), but it don't
help the situation much at first glance.

I'm looking forward to when Indian, Chinese, and perhaps Russian, companies
uproot the dominance of American "think-tank-consultancies" like Gartner et
al.  Wonder how Gartner's gonna view the situation, in 3 to 5 years say,
if/when their profits have gone off-shore...  They might have a different
take on the situation, altogether.

Very similar thing happened, btw, with O'Reilly et al seeing their
book-publishing biz getting "Open" Sourced.  (What goes around often comes
around pretty quick!)  Mebbe they'll make it up setting up conferences and
selling coffee-cups, but I'm sorta doubtful about that, long term.

| -----Original Message-----
| [mailto:midrange-nontech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
| Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 6:03 PM

| > From: rick.baird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
| >
| > While true, this has always been true and
| > we've always found our way out of the problem.  Forward thinking
| societies
| > will find something else they are better at than the rest of the
| world.
|
| This time around is different.  Typically, the jobs that were being
| farmed out were fairly low on the food chain - they tended to be those
| jobs which relied more on labor than brains.  As these jobs were
| offshored, it freed companies up to employ more of the higher-paying
| jobs that required more education or training.  At the same time, the
| money that was saved was poured back into the economy, because the
| companies continued to pay American workers higher salaries as they
| moved up the rungs of the pay scale.
|
| This created the concept of an "upwardly mobile" population, wherein the
| idea was to continue to make companies more profitable so that they
| would in turn create more high-paying jobs for American workers to
| settle into.  That was the unspoken contract.
|
| Unfortunately, the American companies, especially the multinationals, no
| longer live by that contract.  Instead, the profits generated from cheap
| labor (as well as all the other cost-cutting we've seen over the years
| in things like managed health care) no longer go to generate jobs.  They
| instead are put into the pockets of the shareholders and the corporate
| officers.  Officers receive huge bonuses while laying off thousands of
| workers.  This is reprehensible.  No company should be able to pay
| bonuses while shedding payroll, but that's what we do because the boards
| of directors don't really care what happens to the American economy.
|
| Outsourcing and visas are doubly exacerbating because not only do you
| have the upfront loss of the worker, you also lose that person's tax
| income into the economy, as well as the costs of real estate and
| equipment in the case of outsourcing.
|
| My problem with the phrase "this has always been true" is the fact that,
| no, this has never been true.  In the last four years, we have added
| only two million jobs to the economy, the lowest number since 1956-1960.
| No, this isn't the same concept.  Unless we start seeing growth of
| 300,000 jobs a month in the next couple of months, we may not be able to
| recover.
|
| And that doesn't even address the fact that others have outlined that,
| by outsourcing the high-level jobs, you remove the motivation for
| youngsters to enter the field, thereby losing it forever.
|
| Please, write your Congressional representatives.
|
| www.fairus.org
| www.numbersusa.com
|
| Joe