The multinational corporations have no loyalty except to the bottom line and their compensation.
Actually, you're half correct, Soccerdad. They're really only interested in their compensation, bottom line doesn't mean any thing anymore.
Posted by sf at April 17, 2007 07:49 PMMichael Parenti called it the "third-worldization" of the US. We will be the new Mexicican plutocracy in no time. Oh, well, it was many of our union workers who voted for Ray-gun. Now it will be the rest who shoot themselves in the foot. It's hard to have any sympathy.
Posted by Julie at April 17, 2007 07:55 PMIt doesn't take a crystal ball, and most certainly doesn't take an economist, to forecast the eventual outcome.
Posted by phidipides at April 17, 2007 07:58 PMThings like this are what cause drastic changes in government and regulation. Look what happened following the Great Depression.
Posted by Brian Bell at April 17, 2007 08:14 PMIf you earn more than $25k/year, seriously consider whether your job can be done by someone in India, Ireland or Bulgaria for half that.
Initially, you will probably think "no way". You'll think of all the productivity advantages you get from working in the US, all the shoddy work you've seen from overseas, and other reasons they can't move your job.
I know -- 15 years ago I was in software devt in Silicon Valley while we were moving the undesirable work to India. 10 years ago I was involved in a study of the quality of the work done by India -- it was beyond atrocious.
8 years ago I left that company. Now all but a tiny number of jobs are done in India. They are done badly. However, the exec mgmt doesn't see the connection between poor software and resulting the dramatic reduction in revenues -- there are too many other factors. And each time they review budgets it just seems too tempting to give more jobs to India to save money.
I've since looked around to see what jobs could not be moved. Given the attitude of exec mgmt, the answer is: not many can't be moved. Keep in mind that in today's corporate world the average CEO works less than 3 years at a given company. The old adage about "seagull management" (fly in, shit on everything, leave) is now standard practice. The CEO comes in, manipulates the books to artificially inflate the stock price, and sell and get out before the results of his ill-advised budget cuts become apparent. (If he's good he'll sell the company, thus making his stupid mgmt decisions impossible to detect.)
So, even if it makes bad business sense to move your job off shore, they will do so.
I figure marketing jobs are pretty safe for the next 15 years. It's probably not feasible to have Indians or the Irish figure out the marketing strategies for the US market -- at least not yet.
Legal can, and will, be outsourced. Accounting can clearly be done. Once other countries add a few courses to their curricula about "differences in the law/finance in the US" those people can work elsewhere.
Language is not a barrier -- we already have people with Indian accents doing telemarketing and telesupport, even if they tell you their names are "John McEntire".
In high tech, system integration seems safe for a little while anyway. Computing power, disk space, and memory space become cheaper at a logarithmic rate, consistent with Moore's Law, but data communications pipes and cost/byte transferred are advancing at slower, linear rates. This means that the systems which service the US still generally need to be located in the US for any decent response times. However, even now integrator jobs are more and more being given to remote workers from Latin America or Eastern Europe, with only a few people required on site. It does help that the software development is moving off shore -- the crappier software means more integration problems, which helps the job security for the integrator.
Doctors of course have to be local, but more and more their duties, and the duties of Nurses, are being delegated to low cost substitutes.
Teachers still are generally local, so if you can qualify for a graduate school position you can do okay. However, the reason graduate school salaries have gone up is that the salaries of competitive jobs in the private sector have gone up. As the private sector jobs go off shore, the graduate school teaching salaries will suffer.
All in all, it's not a pretty picture.
Posted by anony at April 17, 2007 09:58 PMOh, well, it was many of our union workers who voted for Ray-gun.
And their children who listen to Rush, vote Republican, are upside down by $10k in their truck loans, send *their* children to slaughter in Iraq, and will be the first to get wiped out in the next economic downturn.
Life's a bitch.
Posted by anony at April 17, 2007 10:03 PMYes. This is happening. But it's not happening with that many people. And remember, we need the workers. The unemployment rate is 4.4%. Can't have the homeless guy under the bridge writing software, decoding DNA, or designing alternative energy solutions.
Free markets are the way, the truth, and the light.
Posted by muckdog at April 17, 2007 10:33 PMFree markets are the way, the truth, and the light.
With $1 trillion in corporate welfare, it's far from a free market. You people can't handle a truly free market. It's too hard.
Posted by phidipides at April 17, 2007 10:58 PM21st Century corporations are driving Americans toward a scene of desolation. The sovereign states with their laws are no match for these organizations and the ruling class they sustain; and penury, homelessness, subsistence wages, broken pensions and social security, destroyed purchasing power, political upheaval and unrest are the certain proofs that not all freedoms are created equal. There will be lots and lots of losers, and Americans hate losers; which will of course cause them to loathe themselves. What a social potboiler that will be! The plantation style of economy will live again under the cold-hearted banner of the new globalism.
The middle class might lose the very real battle to preserve democratic processes. Our children might live to see public schooling deteriorate to nothing beyond the teaching of rudimentary skills.
Of course this is not set in stone and is not inevitable; but if unchecked, the globalization agenda which multi-national corporations are pursuing will lead to the political and economic subjugation of target societies--which in this case--is ours.
The political manipulation which is implied in this process seems diabolical to me. In a BBC documentary, Adam Curtis said not long ago,
"Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares".The worst of our politicians have a lot to answer for, as they allow the middle class to be dismantled, piece by piece, as corporations outsource jobs and depress American wages. But the ruling class has something up its sleeve: the advertisement of a perpetual nightmare.
That reliable monster in a box, the War on Terror, is being used as a magician uses distraction, in a sleight-of-hand trick. The potent effect is that the hand is quicker than the eye; and the theft of national treasure and destruction of democracy continues while public attention is focused elsewhere.
Posted by Copeland at April 18, 2007 12:41 AMJust yesterday, my department announced that we are growing by 400 employees, all overseas.
This is a real problem for employees, but I have some sympathy for the corporations too. It's not like we can isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. We sell to the world and we compete with the world.
Chinese companies don't just make cheap clothes and trinkets anymore. They make the most sophisticated high tech equipment and they are getting better at it. They can sell to the same global customers that we do and we need global customers to survive. If they can do it at a fraction of the cost that we do, ..... You get the idea.
I don't know if this could have been avoided, but I'm not sure the genie can be put back in the bottle.
Posted by FuddleDuddle at April 18, 2007 04:10 AMNo workers No customers
Posted by G at April 18, 2007 05:22 AMThe Establishment Rethinks Globalization by William Greider
It's too late. The US is the becoming the old England with the aristocracy and the paupers.
Posted by Dompierre at April 18, 2007 06:29 AMThe free-trade canary in the coal mine are the native born, working-class people who have long experienced wage loss and job displacement due to the increased hiring of illegal workers primarily in construction, hospitaliy, and retail occupations. The rest of Middle-class America is beginning to wake and take notice now that their ox is being gored by global free-trade demon.
The insourcing and outsourcing of jobs are two sides of the same global free-trade coin. While native-born physicians successfully lobbied Congress to limit the importation of foreign doctors, nurses are not having the same success. Despite the high graduation rates of nursing programs, hospitals are choosing to import nurses from Africa and Asia to fill jobs in America at far lower wages.
Furthermore, the biggest lie to emanate from the Hamilton Project, a global free-trade lie factory, is that America has a shortage of workers.
In the current issue of The Nation, William Grieder writes about another free-trader, Ralph Gomory, who now believes that the integration of markets and the exporting of our engineering and design capabilities will have a devastating impact on America's ability to innovate and sustain middle-class lifestyles. The article talks about Gomory's mission to change the establishment's thinking about global free-trade.
The Democratic Party, which trades on the folklore of standing up for working people, must stop enabling the corporate free-trade, open-border agenda.
Posted by fafnir at April 18, 2007 06:44 AManony, you forgot publishing. My entire profession has been outsourced, and my business is crumbling because the big publishers can send work to India for a fraction of the cost of keeping it in America (I can't pay a typesetter $200/month). And as you mentioned, the work is shoddy, but the quarterly profits look good.
But G is right, too. Without good jobs, how will Americans be able to buy all the stuff that keeps American corporations going? I suppose they'll start selling overseas, too. But if you look at the yearly reports for products like Coca Cola, you'll see that they're not growing much, even worldwide. There's only so much coke people can drink, and it's not an infinite amount.
Eventually it'll sprial downward, and who knows what will happen then.
Posted by merciless at April 18, 2007 07:29 AMPeople seem to think that a great power can make one boneheaded decision after another, yet it will have no lasting effect. That in Murica, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life", no matter what folly you've previously undertaken.
Great Powers decline and fall, usually through the folly of their elites.
We've made more than enough errors in the past decade to sink us. We have given free rein to the worst Robber Barons in a century, wishfully and foolishy thinking they had an interest in the general welfare of the society as a whole. Simply ridiculous, and their "project" is now quite far advanced.
BTW, was Muckclown being sarcastic in his recitation of the Holy Scripture of the Religion of Capitalism? Or does he actually sense holiness in "free markets"? Talk about seeing Wealth as a God....
Posted by euzoius at April 18, 2007 07:30 AMThe unemployment rate is 4.4%.
I know, just for kicks, let's have everyone who can't find work, are off the unemployment rolls or on minimum wages to go down and refile!
That would represent a true number.
euzoius, mucky's not being reverent - he's just of the mind that it's not enough to have his stuff, you have to be able to flaunt it for the stuff to have meaning. He wants to be the Joneses that everyone's trying to keep up with, is all.
Posted by iamcoyote at April 18, 2007 08:06 AManony, you forgot publishing.
Good point. Hey, I wonder if soon the media fatcats will start sending their copywriting work off shore -- then the only ones left in the US will be the talking heads and camera people.
Without good jobs, how will Americans be able to buy all the stuff that keeps American corporations going?
By taking loans against the ever-increasing equity in their homes, of course. Oh, wait ....
Actually, this sort of hits on a mgmt fad that is key to much of what is going on in the world today. This is the "ignore the doomsayers" attitude. This is why the oil execs who are paying others to lie about global warming figure that it will all work out somehow -- why the same execs aren't worried about peak oil (except in terms of how to use it to maximize profits in the near term) -- why Bushco isn't worried about the decline of the middle class -- and why Bushco marched into Iraq despite the warnings from those who foresaw the problems.
There is a lot to be said for ignoring the doomsayers -- as a manager most of the doomsayers you encounter are in fact overstating the problem and most problems do get solved in the normal course of business. However, today's dominant business thinking has taken this attitude to an extreme. I think Colin Powell unwittingly aided the widespread adoption of this management fad with a widely-read presentation he made in the 1990s. One point he made was that experts aren't always right, so you shouldn't follow their advice blindly. His point was right, but now our leaders tend to misuse that advice and simply ignore experts altogether if their advise isn't convenient.
Oh well, like "planned obsolecense" (from Harvard Business School's 1950's "Administrative Practicum" curriculum) this management fad too will be shown to be a disaster.
Posted by anony at April 18, 2007 08:20 AMThe unemployment rate is 4.4%.
Another misleading statistic repeated endlessly by the media.
Then you'll hear things like how unemployment is 10% or so in France or Germany.
What they never tell you is that 4.4% is one of 6 different unemployment statistics the BLS has, and is always the lowest number because they exclude lots of workers. It's called "U1". The "U6" number is a more honest calculation, is consistent with how they do it in Europe, and incidentally is within a percentage point or two of Europe. When you adjust for the higher percentage of illegal workers in the US, who tend to get counted for employment but not for unemployment, and adjust for the longer time between jobs in Europe due to structural difference (for example, jobs almost always start at the beginning of a quarter, and severance is much, much better) the employment supply/demand situations are similar.
In truth 4.4% today is not the same as 4.4% was under Clinton or would have been under Reagan. Statistically, the number of "out of workforce" people is a much higher percentage than before, and the number of "underemployed people" (Those who work an hour a week are considered employed in this statistic) are also much higher.
No one is sure why this is -- but the statistic is nevertheless misleading.
Posted by anony at April 18, 2007 08:32 AMWe all better brush up on our sandwich making skills because the only jobs left in the US are going to be at Subway. I would imagine that the Indian immigrants who work at Subway now will be moving back to India for our old jobs.
Posted by ann at April 18, 2007 08:36 AManony, another reason that it's easy to ignore the doomsayers is that, when you have a couple hundred million stashed away in the Caymans, you don't have to worry about any of this.
I watched a show the other day about a super-lux health clinic being built in Beverly Hills, where the swells could get any procedure or test necessary, including physical therapy, spa services, nutrition, and anything else they need if they get sick or hurt. Only the best doctors.
That's why the robber barons don't care. They're set for life.
Posted by merciless at April 18, 2007 08:45 AMWithout good jobs, how will Americans be able to buy all the stuff that keeps American corporations going?
1. many corporations are multinationals, they don't care where the money comes from
2. Those that aren't multinationals will be as they are bought out over time, or they will just shut their doors
3. The people running the corporations today don't give a crap about the long term future, > 6mos. When it starts to go in the toilet they will sell off their stock take the golden parachute and move to the Caymans.
anony, another reason that it's easy to ignore the doomsayers is that, when you have a couple hundred million stashed away in the Caymans, you don't have to worry about any of this.
Of course. But we're also seeing this management fad practiced by those who haven't made their millions yet.
Posted by anony at April 18, 2007 09:08 AMOf course. But we're also seeing this management fad practiced by those who haven't made their millions yet.
Americans are nothing if not optimistic.
Posted by merciless at April 18, 2007 09:15 AM"In truth 4.4% today is not the same as 4.4% was under Clinton or would have been under Reagan. Statistically, the number of "out of workforce" people is a much higher percentage than before, and the number of "underemployed people" (Those who work an hour a week are considered employed in this statistic) are also much higher."
The way unemployment is measured was changed under the Clinton adminstration.
Bush's 4.4% numbers are directly comparable to Clinton's 5%+ throughout his term.
Posted by lordtyranus2 at April 18, 2007 10:25 AMRE: let's have everyone who can't find work, are off the unemployment rolls or on minimum wages to go down and refile!
Actually ,a refiiling movement ain't a bad Idea .
That is actually a great idea . If you are unemployed more then 6 months or now
doing freelance or forced to do a 100% commission
job with no benefits -refill and watch the spin begin .
IBM is doing it this year too -- thousands of mid-level tech jobs are going to several overseas locations. Sensitive customer data is going with them......
Posted by Anonymous at April 18, 2007 05:38 PM
Both parties have sold out the middle class in America in order to in order to keep stockholders happy. Yes,it can benefit the third world inhabitants by creating a more level playing field for them to earn more and thereby consume more, but it is clear that there is no respect for labor that used to be the backbone of American life. Many American citizens who would have made a decent living 25-50 years ago, now cannot use the same skills because of the global labor market's competition with lower wage costs. Cottage industries are disappearing, along with small busineses as the Mega-marts flood consumeres with cheapeer goods. It appears that until this new way of distrbuting wealth to the already wealthy affects greater numbers in American society, we will put up with it and continue to feel powerless to be able to protect our right to the American dream instead of fearing the alternative nightmare.