One reason I am even more adament about ridding us of this president is that I have been in the midst of being offshored for the last year after 15 years with a company which I won't name for self preservation reasons. I am training my Indian replacements in order to receive severance and a bonus upon my departure. 5 people making less than our minimum wage and little to no benefits will replace me. The company isn't worried about performance it's the bottom line savings.
I doubt anything will be truly done to stem the flow of jobs overseas, the guilty corporations donate to both parties, but at least Kerry mentions something. Bush will never do anything about it. I disagree with his proposed solution however. Why should we offer tax breaks to stem the flow? Why not treat corporations who want to act like a foreign corporation like a foreign corporation? Why should these corporations, many who pay no tax, receive any benefits if, on top of it, they are not employing US citizens/tax payers? Offshore accounts to avoid taxes...X% of your workers reside and work in other countries (work that could be performed here) then you are now considered a foreign corporation. Abuse the H1B visa program you are prosecuted. The H1B visa program is designed to provide talent/skills that cannot be found here in the USA. Leading up to the Y2K dilemma Corp America whined and repeatedly were successful in getting congress to raise the allowable number of H1B visas sighting a shortage of programmers. After Y2K, those visas are good for seven years, these people were then set about the task of taking what they've learned over seas and Corp America began laying off American high tech workers. yes the dot.com burst had a bit to do with the downturn but that wasn't/isn't the talent/skills being offshored.
So, will anything truly stem the flow or are we all relegated to service industry type jobs until salaries and benefits are rock bottom enough to be employable in other fields? I think that's where we are going. But the plus is I will have lot's of fishing time this summer.

Maybe you could get a job with Heinz? Oh that's right they out source most of their business. That must be why they back Bush.

That sucks stl. Not that this helps you at all but anytime I have an issue with a company that I need to call and a foreign speaking person picks up I refuse to speak with them. I ask for an English speaking person and not someone who kind of speaks English. I have canceled two accounts already with companies that I have been with for over 15+ years due to them shipping their customer services over sea, I explained to them that they have done an in-service to this customer and I would find someone who is going to keep their business here. One thing you seem to be a little confused on is blaming it on one pres or one party. You sure don't hear one side over the other speaking up to loudly on how they are going to end this BS. Again I would say that this was purely bipartisan and ALL those politicians are running the same circles and wearing the same class rings are sucking every drop out of us they can. I thought that WTO and NAFTA came on BC's watch??? Just wondering why GW is taking more heat from BC's term???

What I would like to see be done is to tax those companies that ship the jobs over seas as if their employees still work in this country. Why not still have them pay into SS and any other tax you can think of.

NAFTA was only North America but even Mexico can't compete with the cheap labor in China, Russia and India. And you are right it's not party specific, although it does smack of trickle down economics (whatever is good for the bottom line is good for America and the money will trickle down to the less fortunate). I don't think it will slow until wages and benefits hit rock bottom in the US. Neither party will do a dang thing about it.
I had the same experience recently. I had a bad wireless router at home. I called Netgear I get someone in India whom I can barely understand and whom can't understand me. And she was no help. I called my phone company to find out if there's a compatibility issue with my DSL modem. I get India again and this guy is worse. I sent the router back with a nasty note.

Given a choice, the American people en mass have proven they will pick the most competitive source for products and services..Look at all the talk on this BB about how the new warehouse sporting goods store is coming to town near Silverdale and the prices will be so much cheaper....You should ask yourself : Given the choice, would you really pay $5.00 for something made in America or would you pay $1.50 for the same thing made in China? Is the American version really better because it is made by a worker who gets $25.00 per hour with medical, dental, vision, 401K, paid leave....etc....and union protection?

Right now we are shipping all of our scrap metal to China and steel prices are skyrocketing...China is growing at a phenomenal rate and they are also using tremedous amounts of gasoline and other raw materials we use. They are paying top dollar for these raw materials and can still compete worldwide due to labor costs that approach nothing. In Bangladesh a worker making $1.00 an hour would be rich while no one in the US works for less that $5-$7.00 per hour for an entry level job.

US companies have been outsourcing for many years and many more will do so to compete. If they don't they will go out of business. Microsoft started doing this along time ago because there were not enough high quality employees in the US to draw from. In India there are many who outqualify most of the US candidates. Now the practice has gone wild with all companies looking at outsourcing to keep up with their competitors. In a global economy we better be ready to compete one way or the other or we will be the "second class" country.
If you try to tax away the problem you will end up with yet another beauraucracy full of loopholes and exceptions. You can't make a law that says no company can employ anyone form outside the US either. I think we need to find a way to compete and start by not sending so many of our nnatural resources over to Japan and China including our fissh...If we do that , however, the trade deficit will kill us....A global economy is a complicated mess. Certainly more complex than reducing it to a Democrat versus Republican blame game that will go nowhere.

"Microsoft started doing this along time ago because there were not enough high quality employees in the US to draw from. In India there are many who outqualify most of the US candidates." The qualification issue is simply not true in my experience. Those replacing me have a little more than a years experience and it shows significantly. Microsoft opened a campus in India to train workers. They could have done just the same here. But it was so much cheaper. They even teach english over there and concentrate hard on trying to rid them of the Indian accent so they sound more American.
The only thing that makes it a party issue is that one candidate actually talks about doing something about it whereas the other states it's good for us.
Any job that can be trasmitted is going out of the country. Programming, Call centers, tax prep, accounting, radiology (isn't that weird?), you name it. If it's something that can be transmitted as data then those careers are gone. Small business needs to be alarmed as well. If your customers wages are dropping then your profits are going to drop too unless you are willing to give the axe or pay cuts to your long time employees. When this hits rock bottom, if it does, it will make the oil bust in Texas seem like nothing. When wage's plummet or disappear and people are stuck in mortgages that they can't get out of because the house is worth less than the mortgage we'll see record bankruptices although we are already seeing record bankruptcies.

PS, I've always been for a ban on sending our food supply (fish) over seas while there's a shortage of it right here.

I know that what NAFTA is. Just about any long haul truck driver will be able to tell you more than I ever will about the love they have for NAFTA. Canada to Mex...

Not trying to insult you PMARTIN.
I'm starting to think those WTO protesters in Seattle had the right idea. I should just take my severance and move to India and live like a king. I wonder what they fish for over there?

Sorry about your job. So we should kick all the forign corporations with American employees out of the US to be fair? I mean i can name a few german and swiss corps that have about 10k employees here in the US. How about all the Japanese and german cars made here in the US. Lets kick them out too they should be made in Tokyo and then we can import them. It's like loggers and commercial fisherman knowing for years that their industries are dead ends and doing nothing. Then blaming it on the govt. and looking for the govt to bail them out. We are responsible for this happening and more so liberals than anyone else. Look at all the costs stacked on American business for social , environmental, legal etc that they do not face overseas. All to build a cheaper product so American workers can buy it cheaper and live in a bigger house. The way you are as a consumer plays the biggest role is this Darwinian business model called capitoplism. The pendulem swings both ways and you have to accept the downside with the up. Thats life. Blaming it on the president is very liberal when the majority of the blame rests with you. It your life not his. It has been said that Americans are like little kids always looking for the next sweet treat .

I’ll find something else.
So, why kick them out if they are employing Americans? Let their own countries worry about it. Or shouldn’t we, as a country, be concerned about ourselves? I’m willing to bet every company and industry you just mentioned has received subsidies (welfare) out of yours and my pockets. And, no it’s not like the loggers or commercials. This has happened very quickly and the corps doing it are stringing employees along and lying to them while behind the scenes are planning their demise. So, what it boils down to is we need to mess up our evironment as bad as other countries have in order to compete for jobs? We also need to be virtually enslaved with no workers right laws in order to compete? Don't want to work 80 hours a week for a buck an hour? Too bad, the next guy is more desperate and will be willing. You see the downward spiral and what it does to the lower and middle class? Many products are getting cheaper here in the US. But, they are even cheaper overseas because we pay the added cost for R&D subsidizing those lower overseas prices. And true capitalism doesn’t exist when you throw in subsidies and tax breaks. Those come right out of the taxpayers pockets. And all you want in return is a cheaper product? What do you think of a corporation who gives it’s CEO a million dollar raise while doing a mass layoff to cut costs? Just good for business…good for America? Nope, it’s a crock. Corp America does owe the American worker. It’s because of the American worker that they’ve become so successful. Now they are trying to say the American worker is preventing them from being even more successful.

Yeah it all has to come to a head down the road. Once our purchasing power as consumers and the tax base is gone something will have to be done. I hope.

"Corp America does owe the American worker."

Sounds a lot like Karl Marx to me. Maybe you should seek employment in North Korea.? You could be a special policeman.You could round up all the dissidents who don't agree with you and put them in prison. I'm sure the "state" would put you up in a nice hooch and give you three squares a day....

As an adult you have to accept the good with the bad. The good is the opportunity to do you as well as you can the bad is there are no guarantees. My industry may be obsolete tomorrow and I have to plan for the eventuality and live my life accordingly. Bill Gates once was asked why he runs his business as if it were going to be gone tomorrow. He said, there will be a 16 year old kid with a better idea some day just like me.
Cold hard reality of capitalism.

It's not true capitalism though. True capitalism you wouldn't be subsidizing private industy with your pay check. And there are no gaurantees. You are right. Those whom thought they had health care during retirement are now finding that cold hard reality out. Why is that OK? You've already retired thinking you have paid health care and they can yank it away and put you on medicare ala the taxpayer. At the same time corporations are allowed to seriously underfund pension plans....another subsidy. Fully fund them or don't offer them. One or the other. What about the airline industry we, the taxpayers, bailed out after 9/11 and then they went on a layoff spree. The system is seriously messed up. No more subsidies and pure capitalism then you'd have an argument. Until then they have a duty to the taxpayers.

I think what we are saying stlhead is that we should all take responsibility for ourselves and not look to Uncle Sam or the corporate board room for a security blanket. Public companies have a problem in that they have to dwell too much on the share price, dividends and stock options. Go to a stockholders meeting as a guest sometime (assuming you own no stock)...

I work for a Warren Buffet( one of the most successful yet lowest paid CEOs in the country) company now and before he bought us out we were one of the Fortune 100 companies....I learned alot about how the company management style changed when stock price was replaced by the bottom line as a priority.

My dad taught me many years ago to not feel indespensible. He told me to put my finger in a glass of water....then he said to pull my finger out... He said the the hole my finger left behind is how much I'll be missed when I'm gone....That has sure been true. He worked hard for the same company for 30 years and was laid off and replaced by two women who, combined, made less money. After that Senator Henry Jackson helped pass a law making that cruel practice illegal. Dad was a devout democrat and union member. My mom is now living off only her social security as once he died his was over. She gets about $100 a month from my dad's "retirement" from the big company he worked for all his life....

The moral is that he taught his son to stand on his own two feet and work hard and not to expect anything from anyone. He taught me to anticipate change and be proactive so as not to be destroyed by the inevitable changes. Maybe that is why I am a conservative...not because I am greedy and hate the environment but because I believe in personal responsibility and don't look to big government to take care of me cradle to grave. I don't hate corporations. I don't begrudge hard working members of unions even though I think their time has long since past. I don't hate government workers even though I think there are way too many of them.

So don't just sit there and moan about the big company bad guys who screwed you over....innovate...be proactive..get a government job ..whatever but don't blame anyone but numero uno for your lot in life.

NYTimes.com > Opinion





OP-ED COLUMNIST
Losing Our Edge?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published: April 22, 2004

Columnist Page: Thomas L. Friedman

I was just out in Silicon Valley, checking in with high-tech entrepreneurs about the state of their business. I wouldn't say they were universally gloomy, but I did detect something I hadn't detected before: a real undertow of concern that America is losing its competitive edge vis-à-vis China, India, Japan and other Asian tigers, and that the Bush team is deaf, dumb and blind to this situation.

Several executives explained to me that they were opening new plants in Asia — not because of cheaper labor. Labor is a small component now in an automated high-tech manufacturing plant. It is because governments in these countries are so eager for employment and the transfer of technology to their young populations that they are offering huge tax holidays for U.S. manufacturers who will set up shop. Because most of these countries also offer some form of national health insurance, U.S. companies shed that huge open liability as well.

Other executives complained bitterly that the Department of Homeland Security is making it so hard for legitimate foreigners to get visas to study or work in America that many have given up the age-old dream of coming here. Instead, they are studying in England and other Western European nations, and even China. This is leading to a twofold disaster.

First, one of America's greatest assets — its ability to skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world and bring them to our shores to innovate — will be diminished, and that in turn will shrink our talent pool. And second, we could lose a whole generation of foreigners who would normally come here to study, and then would take American ideas and American relationships back home. In a decade we will feel that loss in America's standing around the world.

Still others pointed out that the percentage of Americans graduating with bachelor's degrees in science and engineering is less than half of the comparable percentage in China and Japan, and that U.S. government investments are flagging in basic research in physics, chemistry and engineering. Anyone who thinks that all the Indian and Chinese techies are doing is answering call-center phones or solving tech problems for Dell customers is sadly mistaken. U.S. firms are moving serious research and development to India and China.

The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former (I've been no exception), we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We can't wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time.

Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, noted that Intel sponsors an international science competition every year. This year it attracted some 50,000 American high school kids. "I was in China 10 days ago," Mr. Barrett said, "and I asked them how many kids in China participated in the local science fairs that feed into the national fair [and ultimately the Intel finals]. They told me six million kids."

For now, the U.S. still excels at teaching science and engineering at the graduate level, and also in university research. But as the Chinese get more feeder stock coming up through their high schools and colleges, "they will get to the same level as us after a decade," Mr. Barrett said. "We are not graduating the volume, we do not have a lock on the infrastructure, we do not have a lock on the new ideas, and we are either flat-lining, or in real dollars cutting back, our investments in physical science."

And what is the Bush strategy? Let's go to Mars. Hello? Right now we should have a Manhattan Project to develop a hydrogen-based energy economy — it's within reach and would serve our economy, our environment and our foreign policy by diminishing our dependence on foreign oil. Instead, the Bush team says let's go to Mars. Where is Congress? Out to lunch — or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith's job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean — without thinking about a national competitiveness strategy. And where is Wall Street? So many of the plutocrats there know that the Bush fiscal policy is a long-term disaster. They know it — but they won't say a word because they are too greedy or too gutless.

The only crisis the U.S. thinks it's in today is the war on terrorism, Mr. Barrett said. "It's not."

I'm not pissing and moaning about my situation. I've always landed on my feet and am sure I will do so this time as well. Actually I am probably one of the lucky ones as I might have outlasted the down turn. Many in my field were off shored one to two years ago and haven't worked since.
I do own stock and have attended shareholder meetings.
Speaking of Warren Buffet, he recently stated that if the top 450 corporations in America paid the taxes they should be paying no American citizen would have to pay any tax at all.

Here are two recent local examples of corporate high jinx on the tax payer:

Immunex: I am sure glad I don't live in Seattle. Immunex threatened Seattle that if it didn't receive subsidies it was leaving town. Seattle tax payers began building Immunex an overpass and other amenities. The reason cited was keeping jobs here. before the project was half complete Immunex sold to Amgen. Amgen began the layoffs. This wasn't a hostile takeover which means negotiations had been ongoing for some time. Immunex knew full well it was going to sell out while it was blackmailing the taxpayer. kudos to them.

Boeing: Another blackmail against the state. Wasn't it a $2 billion dollar tax subsidy out of our pockets? This time the reason cited was the creation of a relatively small number of new jobs that can no way account for the $2 billion plus keeping the jobs here. Behind the scenes Boeing had already began their offshoring strategy. I know two people who have been advised that their entire departments are going to India. One in IT and the other not in IT.

Time for taxpayers to get some gaurantees in return for their dollar.