Angry cries of America's 'outsourced' middle class

The Arizona Republic ^ | 03.09.04 | E.J. Montini

[Keen-Minded]

This issue is really gonna hurt Bush in the upcoming election unless the recovery starts generating lots of jobs. This is the major issue facing him right now.

I have many friends and colleagues who have been out of work for sometime and they are not happy. Bush is the focus of their frustration.

[Beck_isright]

And now that we've all had a chance to read the RNC faxblast, just how many of those jobs were created directly by or as a result of the government and not private industry? Last month, all 21,000 new jobs were created by the .gov. Chew on that one for a while....

[Beck_isright]

Just because profits improve that does not indicate an expansion. Just why people can not comprehend this is beyond me. And expansion improves household income and the overall quality of life of the nation. This is not happening during this "recovery"....

[Lion in Winter]

Facts... statistics please. Proof please.

[agrarianlady]

She's the single mother, right? Just curious if there is any income coming in from the father? In any situation, it is very difficult to be the sole breadwinner in the family. Two-parent families are much safer economically.

Does she have family she can move in with? If I were a single mother, I wouldn't be head of household. I think I'd try to move in with family of some kind.

But if all that does not apply to her case, well, send her resume to me and I'll pass it around here in Northern VA. My husband and all of my friends are fully employed in the IT industry here. (Hubby used to work for Worldbomb here but got a new job, thankfully).

[Ches]

"tech support lines in Bombay"

LOL! Let's see. We've gutted our manufacturing sector and sent most of our machine tool industry out of the country. We have handed OPEC the power to influence our elections, we're growing the economy through mass immigration, legal and illegal, most of the new jobs Americans don't want to do. Somehow the American workforce is now the laziest on the face of the earth (all my life, it's been called the best on the face of the earth.) I'm just waiting for our brilliant Washington strategists to turn over our food supply and make the surrender complete.

[kenth]

This is not about an emerging technology replacing obsolescence. It is about foreign workers replacing Americans in American companies due to over-taxation, over-regulation, an imbalance in the various 'free trade' agreements as well as an investor/corporate officer base who view the stock market as a lottery.

[Beck_isright]

"REPUBLICAN LEADERS (the stupid party)WILL IGNORE THIS AT THEIR OWN PERIL"

It's shaping up like 1996 again where the idiots in charge of the pubbies all said "what happened" and "who was driving that truck that hit us"...

[Smogger]

"I was an IT manager who worked an average of 65 hours a week," one "outsourced" woman wrote. "I spend between 10 and 14 hours a day looking for work. I am a single mother with two kids, a mortgage, a car payment, credit card bills and utilities . . . I was able to make my mortgage payment this month using my tax refund. I don't know what I'll do next month."

Another newly unemployed professional wrote, "I am a 48-year-old woman who lost my job. I was with the company for 18 years. My job went to China. My husband is still working but for how long? The company he works for is always threatening to go to India. It's as plain as the nose on our faces that we are becoming a third-world country."

A frustrated local spouse added, "A year and a half ago my husband was laid off after 21 years at a large company in the Valley. We have a stack of copies of the jobs he has applied for. Everyday he applies for jobs. Sometimes the response comes back, 'Sorry we have received too many applications.' He has reworked and reworked his resume. He writes the nice cover letter. He applies for jobs that pay half of what he made just to work, but he can't even get an interview."

What do they all have in common? They all likely worked for large companies. Large companies are constantly looking for ways to cut costs through attrition, layoffs, outsourcing. What else is new? I have a hard time feeling sorry for professionals that are being layed off. When it was blue collar manufacturing jobs that were behing outsourced "professionals" and management didn't give a shit. Now that their jobs are on the chopping block it's suddenly a friggin chrisis.

My advice? Work for a small company or start your own. If you good being such intimate contact with the principals will provide job security. You can forget a lot of benefits (lots of time off, matching 401K, dental and vision, Christmas parties), but your company will likely view you as an asset rather then a liability like big companies do.

[lelio]

At least 366,000 jobs have been created in the last five months, over 100,000 of those in January

And to think, that includes the stellar number of 23k (all of which are government jobs) in Feb and the 1k, no I mean 16k, no I mean 8k jobs in Decemeber. Still that's 70k jobs a month -- half of what's needed just to employ the people entering the labor pool.

And though the eight-month recession "officially" ended in November

Is he talking about the 2001 recession?

The Household Survey is used to determine the unemployment rate and accounts for those who are self-employed, and small emerging businesses that might be overlooked by the Payroll Survey.

While I agree that the method of counting employment needs to be improved, the household survey counts you as employed if you did 20 hours of non-paid work for a family business. That's just an example of how this result could be skewed.

Also this article doesn't take into account that the labor market grows each month. Sure a 21k figure might be good, but it isn't if the pool grows by 7x that.

Part of me believes this is why Bush wants to make illegals quasi legal so that he can get some more people into an employment figure as his rosy predictions of job growth since he's been in office have been consistantly off every year.

[Beck_isright]

Exactly. And I see the problems across the spectrum. Small businesses are frustrated by the increased regulations during the last three years and the real lack of tax relief to small business. The failure to control the borders is also hurting many small businessmen who try to compete legally in my state (Florida) and they are pissed at W.

[steve86]

Its like people drank the kool aid and now accept that offshoring R&D jobs is okay if its replaced with a new WalMart supercenter employing the same amount of people.

Yeah, they do accept it. So many posters fail to mention the poor quality of new era retail jobs, not to mention low wages. And by the end of this thread someone will tell a story of how a friend of a friend of a friend started out as a checker and now is the manager of a WalMart Superstore. Of course, 50,000 other WalMart employees started out as checkers and are still checkers. Opportunities galore!

And no, I don't read books, only Harley magazines.

[Beck_isright]

"I'm just waiting for our brilliant Washington strategists to turn over our food supply and make the surrender complete."

You're late to the party; NAFTA is already doing that....

[oceanview]

like it or not, large companies employ alot of americans with good wages and benefits. those positions are the backbone of the US middle class. everyone can't own their own business in the service industry, what are we going to do, all serve each other dinner and fix each others cars?

[steve86]

Because in an election year, people become politically and morally blind to the real issues by trying to create an aura of perfection around their candidates.

Perfect answer of the night.

[oceanview]

and RFID technology is going to put all those retail checkers on the street too.

[Beck_isright]

Great advice but if you have kids, it's a risk very few can afford to do. Seriously though, it's what I did in the early 90's and despite the pain, I don't regret it.

[SCalGal]

She's the single mother, right? Just curious if there is any income coming in from the father? In any situation, it is very difficult to be the sole breadwinner in the family. Two-parent families are much safer economically.

Divorced, of course - father's too busy with drugs and alcohol to help out any.

[Mike Darancette]

what US job isn't "obsolete by the wages they command

Any job that requires a warm body to be on site.

Don't get me wrong this outsourcing is bothersome in the short term but if we are to have free markets it is something that we must work through because it is the reality of the 21st century.

The trotting out of anecdotal (though personally compelling) victims of outsourcing is no less a political ploy of the left as the left claims Bush showing 9/11 victims. Neither side has a quick answer that the public in a free nation would accept.

Personally I am an IT professional with my own business.

[Alberta's Child]

If Kerry were to win in November, there would be one silver lining in the clouds: these sob stories about "outsourcing" would vanish in an instant. In fact, Kerry would be held up as a "champion of economic growth" even if the unemployment rate rose to 20% after his first year in office and half of all Americans were living in cardboard boxes.