The "race to the bottom" provoked by globalization is well under way, fueled by corporate shortsightedness and a focus on only one party to the "social contract" by which business used to be governed: stockholders. Alan Tonelson is right on the money when he says that "American industry has been firing its best customers, which are its own workers." Don't they get it? If I don't have a job, I stop buying all but totally essential products. That means no new car, no new clothes, no new appliances, no fly/drive vacations.

H-1B visas get the most press, but the L-1 intra-company transfer visas are more fuel for the fire. No, don't blame the folks coming here to get work, or those who may do the work overseas. In their place, finding an opportunity to make more than subsistence wages, I'd do the same.

We must blame American multinational corporations for focusing on short-term, bottom line, "we gotta make our quarterly target for the Wall Street analysts" goals. We must blame American politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, who allow American-based corporations to relocate to offshore P.O. boxes to avoid paying their fair share.

We once were basically an industrial economy. Then, in the recent past, the United States lost significant numbers of industrial and manufacturing jobs. So, we restructured ourselves for the information economy. Now we're losing technical and professional jobs across the board (even medical staff such as the people who read MRI and CT scans are being offshored), information workers are being replaced by outsourcing and offshoring, and the numbers of the long-term unemployed (the ones that don't show up in the statistics because they no longer qualify for unemployment benefits and/or they're no longer looking for work) are growing.

As the offshoring trend continues, our information workers will find themselves moving down the pay scale to keep body and soul together, and all we'll have left in the end is a service economy. But who will we be servicing? Who'll be in a position to buy the services we'll provide? The middle class will be a distant memory ... and will Bill Gates drive up to the burger-joint window so I can ask him: "Do you want fries with that?"

Welcome to class warfare.

-- Maureen Sheridan

There is a voice missing in Katharine Mieszkowski's piece -- that of the people elsewhere in the world who now have the opportunity for well-paid work. Far from being sweatshops, the companies providing offshore programming in places like India generally offer salaries that are generous by the standards of the countries they are based in. Not only does this provide incomes to people who need them more than white-collar Americans do, but it also raises the skill levels in those countries, enabling them, to some extent at least, to develop their potential away from subsistence farming and basic low-wage industrial work. This trend may be hard on individual Americans, but on balance it is good for international development.

-- David Brake

Thank you for such a good, balanced article.

I am currently "training" a group of Indian guys to take over the jobs of my entire group. We all make $60-$95K and these fellows get maybe $15 an hour.

They come over to America for their training and do not even have the wherewithal to contribute to the local economy. Ten guys in one apartment, no car -- in Phoenix, where you can't go anywhere without a car.

Even worse, there are no women in the hundreds of Indian engineers I have seen. The Chinese seem to relegate the women to the testing ghetto. Russians -- no women there, either.

I and fellow women have had to endure blatant sexism. For example, our corporate director of co-sourcing (a lovely euphemism, yes?) told me the Indian engineers and managers do not even speak to her face if a man is there. The same has been my experience, and I am just a very senior technical person. I can tell an engineer to perform a task N times, and it will not get done until a man tells him so!

We are rapidly becoming the coffee-fetchers our foremothers in technology were!

I am not a xenophobe -- I am myself an immigrant, a legal one. I have lived on several continents. I see most of our jobs at least at my company flying off shore.

What's most shameful of all is that the quality of innovation is not there. If I don't exactly tell these guys how to do something, they don't do it. Whereas I could take a summer intern with one year of college from any decent comp sci department in North America. So it is costing $$ to babysit, literally, these fellows on so-called L-1 and training visas.

Some questions to ask: Why not develop talent on the Native American reservations?

Why not hire the unemployed for the lower wages?

Oh, I forgot. Those are people trained to think, not high-tech coolies who will do what the CEO says!

-- Name withheld

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