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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"Your jobs have been Walmarted, baybee" -- readers respond to recent Salon articles on outsourcing.
Nov 10, 2003 | [Read "Gone in the Blink of an Eye."]
The analysis made in the article "Gone in the Blink of an Eye," though backed by some real research, isn't saying anything too new. The worst part is that it reaches the same vague conclusion as many like articles. To quote the article:
"People need to acquire new skills all the time. In a fast-paced globalizing world like ours we are all liable to be obsolete in the blink of an eye."
What skills? This is what I'd like to know. What skills and what markets can somebody move toward to protect themselves from the outsourcing black hole? The blue-collar workers of the '80s and '90s have been retrained to be the white-collar workers that are now getting the shaft. How do these people jump far enough up the food chain to have a chance?
-- Steven Stearns
Your article on job outsourcing was a more honest assessment than most. However, it ended with the usual panacea -- "increased funding for training." What I've never heard is what these outsourced workers are supposed to be trained to do? We don't need 14 million nursing assistants. Or is the training to teach us how to say "Do you want fries with that?" Most of those factory workers that were downsized in the '80s didn't end up working at dot-coms, except maybe in San Francisco.
Vague comments about innovation and retraining don't solve the essential problem -- what are 14 million unemployed people supposed to be trained to do?
-- Karen Wheless
I am a former software engineer and database administrator with a Fortune 500 allegedly-"American" corporation. Several months ago I resigned in disgust for the reasons that Katharine Mieszkowski discusses in her article about the disappearing American Information Technology worker. My employer, NCR Corp., signed an outsourcing contract with HCL Technology of India and made the announcement in early 2000. Thereafter, layoffs and foreign replacement workers in the U.S. were the norm at NCR. After watching this trend for two years, I gave up any idea of a career in information technology.
The Indian workers here in the U.S. on visa received the "knowledge transfers" from U.S. I.T. workers and took it back to India. Team by team the U.S. I.T. workers were replaced as the severance checks grew smaller. Pay raises became unheard of and many of the U.S. I.T. workers came to realize that they were competing with a Third World wage scale. I wondered if anyone in the Congress or the president understood or cared about the destruction of the technical employment sector and the hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs this represented. What I found shocked and disheartened me. The president and many members of Congress have voted to allow foreign technical workers into the U.S. on H-1B and L-1 visas and they are indifferent to the loss of U.S. jobs and the depressed wages that foreign workers have brought.
The president and Congress are pushing ahead with new trade agreements that will further increase the outflow of American Information Technology jobs -- and all "white-collar" jobs. There are very few people in Congress looking at the "big picture" and saying that the American society and our economy will suffer because of the short-term, myopic decisions of corporations only intent upon reducing labor costs to pump up quarterly performance reports. And, in this political campaign season, both political parties and all candidates for president, and many congressional candidates, seem intent on maintaining a complete silence on the H-1B and L-1 foreign worker visa programs and the entire issue of American white-collar job loss. (It is hard not to see this eerie silence as anything other than a self-serving conspiracy to avoid alarming the American people and an avoidance of real popular opinion.)
Mike Emmons, a courageous I.T. worker who "blew the whistle" on Siemens' worker replacement program, maintains an excellent Web site with a great deal of information on the topic of foreign replacement workers and the political machinations of the outsourcing lobby.
-- John
The problem of outsourcing is not one of market forces, but greedy CEOs who care more about their company's stock price than the economic health of this nation. To a person, the sensitivities of 10 institutional investor portfolio managers matter more to them than the toil and sweat of 10,000 loyal employees.
The real laugher is that most of these CEOs would consider themselves "patriotic." American flags fly in their executive suites and on their service vehicles, but the gesture is empty. Overseas outsourcing hurts our economy far more than al-Qaida ever did.
If a presidential candidate endorsed a bill that would annul and prohibit government contracts to any American company that moves jobs overseas, he would get my vote.
-- Russell Shaw
It doesn't take a "study" to know the future of the job market. Think, any job not requiring face-to-face contact is vulnerable to outsourcing. Furthermore, many of those requiring face-to-face for, say, a signature, will only require a worker of minimum education.
To my way of thinking, we are in a job market crisis. What the current administration should be worried about, and employers too, is what happens in a few years when the truly higher paid occupations are gone. I haven't read of any up-and-coming occupations that are growing at a rate similar to the current rate of job loss.
I don't think it xenophobic to say that the U.S. has competently trained its competition while ignoring the consequences at home.
-- Petra Lynn Hofmann
Thanks for the article. I disagree with a lot of what Ashok Deo Bardhan said, but I appreciate that this topic is being kept in the news.
I found it interesting that Bardhan mentioned the disparity in the rate of new engineering graduates. He cites that as a cause of outsourcing, but it's really the effect. Career-savvy students in the U.S. have been abandoning engineering and other technical disciplines recently. Why get an engineering degree when it won't help you get a job?
Globalization is not producing the opportunities he mentions. Good middle-class jobs are disappearing, and the remaining jobs are requiring more and more education and experience while paying less and less.
I also disagree with his views on protectionism. At this point, it's worth a try.
-- Mike Gollub
