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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The increasing move of white-collar jobs overseas is inevitable, says one longtime Silicon Valley activist. So the fight for workers' rights has to go global.
Jan 27, 2004 | If your job has been offshored to another country, where someone else will do it for a fraction of your former salary, should you:
(a) Stand outside corporate outsourcing conferences waving a placard that says "WILL CODE FOR FOOD"?
(b) Start a Web movement or e-mail campaign to lobby the government and other shoppers to stop doing business with companies that send jobs overseas?
(c) Hang up your keyboard and learn a new skill, like massage therapy or nursing, that can't be bought and sold over a phone line with the click of a mouse?
Amy Dean has a more radical, if wonkier, idea.
Hailed as the "Mother Jones of Silicon Valley," Dean has long been well-known in the region as the executive director of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council.
But after 15 years of organizing in the valley, she's now living in Chicago, where she's writing a book -- working title: "Towards a More Perfect Union" -- about workers in the new economy. With a grant from the Century Foundation, she's focusing on how public policy and labor unions must change to serve today's workers.
Dean, who is still the president of the Silicon Valley nonprofit Working Partnerships USA, left her post at the AFL-CIO last July, just as the outsourcing of white-collar tech jobs was becoming a hot topic. But reached at her home by phone, she had plenty to say about what can be done -- and what can't -- to meet the threat of offshoring to the American worker.
What response do you think that U.S. technology workers should make to the offshoring of jobs overseas?
I don't believe that the phenomenon of outsourcing and offshoring will do anything but proliferate over time. As a consequence, employees and their relationship to an employer will increasingly be flexible and volatile.
That means the obligation of the employee is to constantly keep skills upgraded and keep really current in whatever field that you work in. It also means that the social networks that you're a part of become increasingly important, because they become the vehicle that connects you to employment.
The real question, though, about what is to be done about offshoring is that it is as much the employer's responsibility as it is the employees'.
If outsourcing continues as a practice, employers should be obligated to increase the amount of funding that they put into training and to look at calling people back based on seniority. But it's really a public policy question: How do we reform America's labor market institutions to respond to a very changing work environment?
People increasingly will work on a temporary, part-time, contingent, outsourced basis. As a result, our labor laws and employment laws and overall labor market institutions need to change to provide security for those workers who are working in a very different context today than when those laws were written.
Do you think that government policies would have to be changed in order to get employers to do some of the things that you're suggesting? Cost isn't the only reason that companies are offshoring, but it's one major one. It's difficult to imagine companies funding programs to help the workers that they're displacing if the point of displacing them is to save money.
We absolutely have to have labor law reform, employment policy reform, and we even need to look at reform with regard to our trade laws.
We could make some very, very basic changes that wouldn't require a whole lot of political innovation or political courage to ensure that employees that work on a contingent basis are covered during periods of unemployment.
When we created our unemployment insurance system 60-some years ago, we created it with the assumption that there would only be brief periods of interruption of an employee's employment. The economy would ebb and flow. There would be moments when people would get disconnected from their jobs. They would be caught by the safety net and then they would return back to that same job eventually. [But] we know that that's just not the case anymore.
We know that there is a higher incidence of separation for the labor market today than there once was. We know that the majority of people do not return back to the same employer. And as a consequence many of these employees are not eligible for unemployment insurance during the times that they find themselves unemployed.
When we built the National Labor Relations Act, which was a legal agreement that was created 60 years ago, most people had a permanent relationship to one employer over their lifetime. Under those laws, the groups of employees who work for an employer over time can form a community of interest, get together and bargain collectively over terms and conditions of employment.
Well, what's the group for people who may work in the same occupation but are spread across hundreds of different employers? What's the group for employees who work for an employer but aren't housed under one roof, but they're spread across the globe?
It may be true that unions as constituted previously are a relic of the past. But working people have a common basis for unity when it comes to their economic interests.
That's not a relic of the past.
