I am surprised at how passive American workers have become.
A couple of million factory positions have disappeared in the short time since we raised our glasses to toast the incoming century. And now the white-collar jobs are following the blue-collar jobs overseas.
Americans are working harder and have become ever more productive -- astonishingly productive -- but are not sharing in the benefits of their increased effort. If you think in terms of wages, benefits and the creation of good jobs, the employment landscape is grim.
The economy is going great guns, we're told, but nearly 9 million Americans are officially unemployed, and the real tally of the jobless is much higher. Even as the Bush administration and the media celebrate the blossoming of statistics that supposedly show how well we're doing, the lines at food banks and soup kitchens are lengthening. They're swollen in many cases by the children of men and women who are working but not making enough to house and feed their families.
IBM has crafted plans to send thousands of upscale jobs from the US to lower-paid workers in China, India and elsewhere. Anyone who doesn't believe that this is the wave of the future should listen to comments made last spring by an IBM executive named Harry Newman: "I think probably the biggest impact to employee relations and to the [human resources] field is this concept of globalization. It is rapidly accelerating, and it means shifting a lot of jobs, opening a lot of locations in places we had never dreamt of before, going where there's low-cost labor, low-cost competition, shifting jobs offshore."
An executive at Microsoft, the ultimate American success story, told his department heads last year to "Think India," and to "pick something to move offshore today."
These matters should be among the hottest topics of our national conversation. We've already witnessed the carnage in manufacturing jobs. Now, with white-collar jobs at stake, we've got executives at IBM and Microsoft exchanging high-fives at the prospect of getting "two heads for the price of one" in India.
It might be a good idea to throw a brighter spotlight on some of these trends and explore the implications for the long-term economy and the US standard of living.
"If you take this to its logical extreme, the implications for the entire middle-class wage structure in the United States are terrifying," said Thea Lee, an economist with the AFL-CIO.
"Now is the time to start thinking about policy solutions," she said.
But that's exactly what we're not thinking about. Government policy at the moment is focused primarily on what's best for the corporations. From that perspective, job destruction and wage compression are good things -- as long as they don't get too much high-profile attention.
"This is a significant problem, much greater than we believed it was even a year ago," said Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, an affiliate of the Communication Workers of America.
Accurate data on the number of jobs already lost are all but impossible to come by. But there is no disputing the direction of the trend, or the fact that it is accelerating. Allowing this movement to continue unchecked will eventually mean economic suicide for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American families.
Globalization may be a fact of life. But that does not mean that its destructive impact on American families can't be mitigated. The best thing workers can do, including white-collar and professional workers, is to organize. At the same time, the exporting of jobs and the effect that this is having on the standard of living here should be relentlessly monitored by the government, the civic sector and the media. The public has a right to know what's really going on.
US President Donald Trump has gotten off to a head-spinning start in his foreign policy. He has pressured Denmark to cede Greenland to the United States, threatened to take over the Panama Canal, urged Canada to become the 51st US state, unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America” and announced plans for the United States to annex and administer Gaza. He has imposed and then suspended 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico for their roles in the flow of fentanyl into the United States, while at the same time increasing tariffs on China by 10
US President Donald Trump last week announced plans to impose reciprocal tariffs on eight countries. As Taiwan, a key hub for semiconductor manufacturing, is among them, the policy would significantly affect the country. In response, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) dispatched two officials to the US for negotiations, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC) board of directors convened its first-ever meeting in the US. Those developments highlight how the US’ unstable trade policies are posing a growing threat to Taiwan. Can the US truly gain an advantage in chip manufacturing by reversing trade liberalization? Is it realistic to
Trying to force a partnership between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and Intel Corp would be a wildly complex ordeal. Already, the reported request from the Trump administration for TSMC to take a controlling stake in Intel’s US factories is facing valid questions about feasibility from all sides. Washington would likely not support a foreign company operating Intel’s domestic factories, Reuters reported — just look at how that is going over in the steel sector. Meanwhile, many in Taiwan are concerned about the company being forced to transfer its bleeding-edge tech capabilities and give up its strategic advantage. This is especially
Last week, 24 Republican representatives in the US Congress proposed a resolution calling for US President Donald Trump’s administration to abandon the US’ “one China” policy, calling it outdated, counterproductive and not reflective of reality, and to restore official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, enter bilateral free-trade agreement negotiations and support its entry into international organizations. That is an exciting and inspiring development. To help the US government and other nations further understand that Taiwan is not a part of China, that those “one China” policies are contrary to the fact that the two countries across the Taiwan Strait are independent and
RSS