Democrats & Liberals: Archives

I would like to see Democrats take a stand on this. However in my state of Washington many of the DNC had sold out to Microsoft and actually helped them send jobs overseas. I do not like Jay Insley and I am glad I am not in his district. He just got back from India and promised them lots of jobs and strong financial high tech ties.

I agree wholeheartedly with this piece. When will American businessmen realize that they are eventually selling out thier own countrymen for a buck? Who will buy thier goods when no one has a job? Jake, Adam Smith, one of my favorite moderate Dems is pushing a bill through congress right now to prevent this from happening. Adam Smith is a really good Democrat with a lot of integrity. It seems he hasn’t been corrupted yet by the political world. You would really like him I think.

What are the implications that arise from this exodus of IT jobs to India, etc.? The past half century has seen a huge shift in manufacturing from the U.S. to the 3rd world.

While this created temporary bumps in the road particularly for those directly affected, job training programs and greater access to higher education resulted in an overall higher standard of living and career prospects for the vast majority of the population.

But what happens now when the jobs of the highly educated get farmed out to Asia, too? How do we redirect their knowledge, skills, education, etc.? Do new fields appear that absorb the displaced workers? Or does a “Brain Drain” result, with Americans relocating to China, India and Russia to find work?

You are 100% correct. America is being sold out by the capitalists.

It is time to get the greedy pigs to understand that we need to make “things” in order to make money.

This is an example of how the extremes of the political spectrum wrap around on each other; the Buchananite right and the labor union left are both really hot about the “export of American jobs,” but moderates of both parties see it as a net plus.

We live in a Global Village. We want foreigners to buy American goods. We want to raise living standards in the Third World so we aren’t overrun with immigrants who don’t share our values. We care about the poor and downtrodden in the Third World and want to raise their living standards.

For all of these reasons, there have to be jobs in the Third World, not just crappy, dangerous jobs, but good, high-paying jobs (thank you Bubba Clinton) in clean industries. So there it is.

There is a point of view among the ultra-rich and the moderately poor alike that the Third World is supposed to be some sort of Disney Theme Park where colorful natives entertain tourists by scratching out a living from subsistence farming while singing and dancing and practicing traditional arts. Having spent a number of years outside the US, in places like Mexico, Libya, India, and Malaysia, I can tell you from first-hand experience that this viewpoint is not widely held around the world. Parents in developing countries want their children to grow up free of disease, well-educated, happy, and healthy.

That slavery thing just didn’t work out, in other words. So either we’re all reasonably prosperous, or none of us is. No more elitism, bad idea.

Move on.

Holy smokes, people are actually agreeing on something! This is nice to see.

The bottom line is that America can’t compete with China, India, or Russia for workers. How do you compete when the average Indian IT worker will work for 1/3 what an American would? That money the Indian worker gets is a very comfortable salary in India. It would be poverty here.

And that is nothing compared to someplace like China, where some jobs are performed by what amounts to slave labor.

What are we to do? I am not sure mandating jobs stay at home is the final answer, but it may be a start. The final solution needs to be raising the standard of living around the world. I think a global institution that requires fair treatment of workers should police countries, and if you don’t meat certain standards, than there is no free trade. I guess the WTO is supposed to do something like that, but it doesn’t seem like they succeed.

One thing that gets tossed around frequently on a couple boards I’m on is this:

In order to qualify as an American company, you must have X% of your workers/offices located in the US. If you don’t qualify as an American company, you 1) don’t get tax breaks that American companies do, and 2) you have to pay tarriffs to sell your goods in the US.

Certain kinds of workers would probably be exempt from this (for example, Oracle truly needs to have tech support teams around the world because of how much business they do). Still, it would serve as a solid base for encouraging companies to keep their jobs in the US (or, at least, North America, to promote cooperation with our neighbors), without having to mandate it (which falls close to nationalizing industries).

The problem with unchecked capitalism is manifesting itself here. That is not to say that i disagree with all labor overseas as i am a believer that in order for a country to enter its mature economic development stage it must go through an industrial revolution. Industrial revolution is hard and workers get the shaft in the beginning. This is a necessary birth pang. Every country must face hardship to get to the point where it becomes a viable economic power. In many third world counties American businesses are welcomed by the people because even though they have poor working conditions they are paid far more than if the facility had never moved in. A side effect to this situation is the proliferation of wealth on the corporate side not being shared at lower levels. I believe that through very minimal profit sharing incentives a corporation could grow immensely and have happy workers who are therefore much more likely to produce a viable economic region. Wealth has a tendency to erase violence when there is a middle class and subsequently growth proliferates in all economic sectors. Without that base the model fails.
The basis for this is the middle class. A balance must be met to ensure that occurs and since man cannot effectively govern himself it is important to enlist the aid of a higher moral power. Capitalism is a double edged sword and must be handled delicately to ensure the hand that feeds it is not cut. It has been highly successful in the past 200 yrs and has managed to create a more freedom loving and peaceful world.

I am a freelancer for hire and have a dozen clients or so that I routinely handle Web projects for. Most are small businesses with fewer than 50 employees.

Some of these clients have tasks that need completing that are very labor intensive, like data entry or basic data correction for their Web sites. Of course, since I am the guy handling their Web stuff they hand this stuff off to me. I have two choices. The first is to spend every free second I have doing this very time-consuming work. This leads to delays in my other work, pissing off my other clients and generally making my life terrible. My second option is to find some cheap labor to do this work for me. With my connections in Russia, I can hire 1-2 people who write and speak perfect English for a tenth of what it would cost me, to do this work. Which option do you think I chose?

Additionally, I often need some custom back-end programming done for some of my clients. Again, my choices are:

1) spend my time learning it myself
2) hire a local American programmer
3) hire a brilliant Russian programmer for a 20th of the cost of the American programmer

My client loves that I can pass these savings along to them after I take my cut of the profit. My job is easier, my client is happy, I’m happy because I get to help out my friends in Russia who like the elevated income I pay them (typically twice what they would normally make in Russia).

While I agree that corporations should refrain from wholesaling their tech jobs overseas, I’m of the opinion that businesses should take advantage of the world labor market when they can.

The U.S. was partially built on cheap labor. We can’t ignore that fact. A large percentage of our consumer products have been made overseas for decades. Traditionally, it has mostly been the manufacturing companies that have taken advantage of the cheap labor in developing countries, but now that there exists a large pool of talented and inexpensive labor in such places as India and Russia, the technically-oriented companies that provide services cannot ignore it.

Instead of whining about the situation, Americans being shut out of tech jobs should go back to school and learn Russian or Hindi or Sanskrit and maneuver themselves into a management position to take advantage of this trend. I’ll bet the job market for bi-lingual American management is booming right now.

I think I actually agree with Richard. I’m resisting it, but I think I just might agree.

:-)

Well it is easy to understand. Richard has been to the third world, has seen poverty and oppression as have I. It really is a good point.
Cam has another good point from an economic perspective.

When we have talent located around the world capable of developing high-tech products and services, we begin to test the effectiveness of systems of education and management. The results of those experiments can be very disturbing, hence there’s a certain resistence on the part of the privileged classes to allowing the experiment to take place.

It shouldn’t be long before we have an Indian Oracle, for example, if IIT is as good as it’s cracked-up to be.

Cam, I speak both Spanish and German and would love to learn another language but from what I’ve seen in my own personal experience, Americans who actively seek out and learn a foreign language are in the minority. American culture is so insular in nature that, like Richard points out, Americans see the rest of the world (not just Malaysia, India, or Mexico) like it was one big Epcot Center. When living in Germany, there was nothing I hated more than to see a bunch of American tourists shouting at someone to help them “understand” English.

With that said, I’m not opposed to helping the Third World better its standard of living but my biggest fear is that, like I said in the article, is that it will lead to an era of horrible xenophobia in America that isn’t just driven by the uneducated masses but by people who consider themselves to be educated. My worry is that these people will become leaders and America will have a whole generation of people who have grown up hating the “outside” world. Our history of isolationism points to such a possibility - why don’t we ever admit that Henry Ford was an ardent anti-Semite or Lindberg was on the side of the Nazis? Granted, in the greater context of World War II era America, the Nazis were seen as the ultimate evil but now we live in a time when those who remember Nazism and its atrocities are fading away. I had the chance to interview my host mother and grandmother, while living in Germany, about that time in German history and they DID NOT give it glowing reviews. I’ve heard the other side of the story, though from Germans who praised the fact that the trains ran on time, food was on the table, and people had work. But at what cost?

Germany held onto their scientists and still had the power to create some amazing inventions. America and “American” IT companies don’t seem to care about that though. Like Benjy said, there is a serious brain-drain issue here. As the costs of higher education rise exponentially, American students are looking for careers which will, at least, pay for the price of their education and IT doesn’t seem to be one of those career choices. The quest for the American dream tells people that they have to acquire more and more tangible goods - a notion that is supported by constant releasing of consumer confidence ratings and consumer spending reports. At what point do we realize that the race to buy more and more stuff is fruitless? The global economy, the Internet, and the increasing speed at which companies do business seems to be speeding up the process by which the limited wealth and resources of a country are shifted away (i.e. what used to take hundreds of years now takes a decade or so) and I’m worried that people aren’t ready for the speed at which that change can take place. We’ve created technology that we can’t keep up with and I’m hoping that human morals take over before fear and anger fill the void first.

Aargh, I’m agreeing with Richard Bennett.

Well, except for the part about how it’s the extremes of both parties. My impression is that the protectionist impulse is scattered across the political spectrum. But the part about needing good middle-class jobs in the third world could have come straight out of one of my postings at Cafe Utne.

If there’s a wage differential across a border, caused by barriers to trade, then making the border completely permeable will eliminate the wage differential, and move the system to a new equilibrium that’s a transfer payment away from being an improvement for everyone. (Whether or not to do the transfer payment is a question of distribution, and economics typically doesn’t have good answers for questions of distribution.) I think, however, that making an impermeable border slightly permeable (or a slightly permeable border slightly more permeable) can distort both economies, causing things to get worse before they get better.