No, no one does that. But if we follow your plans to make their steel more expensive, they might shut down the plants they have.
tell us who benefits from the tech industry moving offshore?
To the extent that the tech industry does it and it cuts costs, it's part of the reason you and millions of others can afford to type on your computer right now, actually. And as a small businessman, I will gladly outsource tech work if it helps keep me afloat.
BTW, we're still short on health care workers--some parts of the country are in crisis.
health care workers are essentially quasi-government workers - since a significant part of health care dollars comes from government.
maybe you could identify exactly where private sector people ought to find jobs - the real private sector, not government or health care or some other industry tied to government spending. because those are the workers that comprise the net tax base for the country.
every restaurant and hotel owner in the US is screaming that they need mexican illegals as a source of cheap labor to "reduce costs". as if they have some god given right to low cost labor. what's next, if a small business owner came crying that they needed slavery to keep their business afloat - should we give it to them? because thats the logical extension of this "I deserve unlimited access to lower costs" mantra.
That's right. I am looking forward to the day when all those millions of unemployed factory workers become nurses so they can take care of me when I am in the hospital. Do you really see the people standing in the unemployment line, who have been working an assembly lines their whole lives, as a viable choice to be hanging IV's, passing out medications, changing bandages and being able to make life sustaining choices for patients?
I have great respect for my fellow Americans but I also know that few of them are qualified for the health care field.
>And as a small businessman, I will gladly outsource tech work
>if it helps keep me afloat.
You do realize that as a small businessman, the only reason you are afloat is that the business you happen to be doing has not yet been exposed to the crushing weight of some offshore competitor who can hire workers for $0.25 an hour, don't you?
Or are you one of those arrogant franchise owners who has deluded themselves into believing that they are something other than an outsourced middle manager for a MNC...
Wonderful news.
We are to become nurse maids while WHO defends us?
We will lob "Depends" at the enemy?
As the quality in IT hardware and services declines in order to cut costs, the consumer or small business owner does not see the difference between domestic American products and services. If based on cost alone, it doesn't matter. The acceptance of poor quality service turns into a downward spiral of cost slashing and even further deteriorating quality in equipment and services.
The cultural differences offshore and "programmed" responses is very significant to those that are at least half-way knowledgeable about computer equipment. In only recent years has the bulk of computer manufacturing (not including specialized components and circuit boards which have been made overseas for quite a while) and support services been offshored. All of this cost savings have not been significantly been passed along to the consumers of their products except the extremely larger companies which purchase in such large quantities. The bulk of the savings is retained by the companies offshoring. Many of the companies offshoring (especially those offshoring some of the much more technical jobs such as financial analysts, engineering, etc.) are saving significant funds by offshoring, but the largest expenses have been with mid- and upper-level management whose salaries are grossly misaligned in comparison to the average and even technical employee. Greater funds could be saved by eliminating non-productive and redundant management staff or cutting the pay raises to the corporate executives who think that they deserve all of the funds that they are saving the companies when they should earn only a percentage...but ignore the fact that in actuality, they are gutting the long-term value of their companies at the advantage of short-term profits.
Also, there is a very continued push to bring in more experienced foreign technical workers (including engineers, nurses, and others) through the H-1B and L-1 visas. Corporations don't want to put the investment into assisting or supporting local employees who are going through technical and academic learning. Buy the workers for a couple of years, and then send them back. If it saves them bucks...why have to actually be a corporate leader/manager and work too hard developing and implementing cost savings through improvements in productivity and service efficiency...it is too much hard work...and nobody expects it.
Maybe American citizens should make corporate management more accountable to all of their stockholders and stakeholders. So many Americans own outright or own interests in stock or mutual funds, and it is time to actually make CEOs work at building companies and their long-term value rather than just building excuses and biding time until their forced (or ultimate) departure.
Not relevent to your point since it was just a short-term problem, but an amusing anecdote (treat it as apocryphal, if you like, since I no longer have the newspaper with the article and this is just from memory): during the shutdown of the west coast ports, Toyota actually flew in steel (specialty steel, if memory serves) from Japan for its American plants.
As has been noted by many observers over the years, Japanese companies often care more about good quality than good profits, and almost always care more about their long-term market share than almost anything except quality.