Reply #29: Here's a few . . . [View All]

First of all, the indignity of training your replacement as a requirement for severance should be made illegal. This isn't "knowledge transfer", it's corporate nose-rubbing, demoralizing and pointless frat-boy-esque hazing.

Secondly, it isn't as black and white as simply passing a law to stop it. Several measures need to take place not only in government, but in education and the business world as well.

First, American companies have to concede that outsourcing indeed represents a problem for the worker. Simply brushing aside the argument as "you're either free-trade or protectionist. It's THAT SIMPLE" is foolish: offshoring has clear winners and losers that need to be defined not based on hypothetics and theory (which is how everyone is doing it now), but reality.

Next, the US government needs to begin to measure the magnitude of the problem. Currently, no one really knows how many jobs have actually been offshored because corporations either refuse to report it, period, or announce proposed offshoring at a later date after the cuts happen, which means either more or less jobs will be leaving.

US visa policies should also be reviewed with an eye toward protecting America’s labor market. Too many corporations exercise loopholes to get around the current Visa restrictions, particularly regarding L-1s. Visa abuse is rampant within many corporations in the race for cheaper labor here and abroad.

Meanwhile, the US should put more effort into helping and retraining workers displaced by offshoring. Our country has an atrocious record when it comes to redeployment of US workers at a comparable salary and skill set. We don't give near enough help that is needed for the cruelly downsized, and this especially holds true for blue collar workers. The worker has to completely fend for his or herself once fired, and this usually means developing a skill set for which they aren't fit or able to afford training for. Unemployment insurance is painfully inadequate. We spend billions on pork, corporate welfare and oil wars yet we shit on the very people and resources that makes the nation work.

What I'm saying is that there should be far less emphasis by business leaders to adopt the destructive and short-term way of thought. Just because it's "good business" doesn't make it "right".

More:

Ideally, one thing that should happen would be for US CEO's to . . . and I'm just spitballing here, stop being so damned GREEDY, but since that's never going to happen -

* Stop giving tax incentives to corporations to move jobs/companies abroad.

* Make it illegal for venture capitalists to be allowed to dictate to start-ups who they're required to hire.

* Push forward legislation that technologies developed by taxpayer-funded research (as virtually everything is) can be licensed only to American companies using local labor for, say, 10 years.

* Organize. Why there are so few labor unions for white collar workers is beyond me completely. I know there's WashTech or AEA, but there needs to be more.

* Keep the caps on H1-b/L1 visas.

* I know this is fantasy, but Universal Health Care could possibly help. That is, if you can get past Big Pharma and Big Insurance.

* Bring manufacturing back to the US in lower-cost areas. A weak nation is one that has no solid manufacturing base.

* Decide that companies with a large percentage of their workforce located overseas no longer qualify for lucrative "American-only" federal contracts.

* You start more pro-worker legislation and curb offshoring sharply, it will encourage more collegiate entries into the science and math fields. Common Sense 101: You can't expect kids to take up a career field when you're not giving them a single incentive (i.e. offshoring tech jobs, R&D, etc) to do so. No ROI, no inclination to learn. Simple.

The Bush administration, however, isn't doing a damned thing to stop this practice. To add insult to injury, it is pushing to expand trade treaties under terms that will make it even easier for CEOs to get even richer by shipping more jobs overseas.

I also don't buy the canard of "retraining" since it doesn't often work in the real world. Increased globalization has reduced the lag time between the initial development of new technologies and the offshoring of most related jobs. It took more than 50 years between the invention of the automobile and the outsourcing of car production to low-wage countries. But even if American labs produce breakthroughs in new fields such as nano- and biotech, the vast majority of work -- both technical and production -- will likely be sent abroad quickly. No amount of training will help us when those jobs leave the country.

If politicians know that retraining can't work, why do they continue to promote it? Easy: It gets the public off their backs. Instead of blaming the government, or the corporations that have eliminated so many jobs, the logic of "retraining" is to blame the victim. If you're out of work, don't complain. Just buck up and take responsibility for getting the skills you need. Ownership society truly does mean "You're on your own". If economists, industry pundits and financial analysts cannot point to a single industry that's creating a great deal of jobs and is sustainable for the time being, how is the average American worker expected to know?

I mean, what's left? Are we all going to have to become genome researchers or some other elaborate uber-career that takes over half a decade to train for? What do you tell the people who only have the mental capacity for blue-collar work? College isn't for everyone, you know.

From Outsourcing America's authors:

"As for the offshoring of government work, while falling short of calling for a prohibition, the writers point out that public agencies need to be more judicious in striving to keep taxpayer-supported jobs in the states. "We should recognize the enormous value of keeping certain types of government procurement onshore, especially in a time when we are far from full employment. In terms of high technology, creating strong preferences for American workers not only is in the national interest but is in the interests of national security."

In the long term, the writers feel that tomorrow’s workers need to be trained to have lifelong marketable skills. "If, indeed, our young people are facing a future in which they will have five careers rather than five jobs within one career, then adaptability is the desirable attribute for students." That means developing transferable skills that can be applicable to a new career, whatever it might be. "

One Free-Trade apologist lamented "People, we HAVE BRAINS." Doesn't mean a hill of beans if you ain't got the capital or resources in which to use them.