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This Article Explains Why Apple Makes iPhones In China And Why The U.S. Is Screwed Henry Blodget | Jan. 22, 2012, 5:30 AM | 3,191 | The manufacturing processes of Apple and other electronics companies have come into sharp focus of late, with the revelation of more details about what life is like for the Chinese workers who make the world's gadgets. When one reads about these working conditions--12-16 hour shifts, pay of ~$1 per hour or less, dormitories with 15 beds in 12x12 rooms--the obvious assumption is that it's all about money: Greedy manufacturers want to make bigger profits,...

Reporting from Washington and Chicago— Without ever mentioning Mitt Romney by name, President Obama on Wednesday introduced a theme he’s certain to use often against the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination: that he helped send American jobs overseas during his corporate career. In a White House seminar on creating domestic jobs, Obama praised corporate executives who have expanded their workforces in the United States. The president also proposed tax code changes to encourage such decisions. “That’s exactly the kind of commitment to country that we need, especially right now,” Obama said. “We’re in a make-or-break moment for the...

Two young French songsters from Bordeaux have been chosen to write the official song of the 2012 Obama campaign for reelection. The song entitled What More is scarcely finished. Yet beginning in March, it will become the official hymn of the Barack Obama campaign. Obama chose two young French musicians, Tony Jazz and Mathieu Billon, to create a song that would rejuvenate his image  “It is a song directed at young people,” said Tony Jazz. The song itself is composed from American soul singer Al Green’s song What More Do You Want From Me integrated with clips of Obama’s speeches....

U.S.-based multinational corporations added 1.5 million workers to their payrolls in Asia and the Pacific region during the 2000s, and 477,500 workers in Latin America, while cutting payrolls at home by 864,000, the Commerce Department reported. The faster growth abroad was concentrated in emerging markets, such as China, Brazil, India and Eastern Europe, according to economists Kevin Barefoot and Raymond Mataloni, of the U.S. Commerce Department. "Judging by the destination of sales by affiliates in those countries," the economists wrote in a recent survey, "the goal of the U.S. multinational corporations' expanded production was to primarily sell to local customers...

For Immediate Release: Wednesday, October 26, 2011  WASHINGTON, D.C. – Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, today renewed his call for a competitive bidding process to manage the government’s top website for job seekers.In a letter today to the Office of Management and Budget, Kerry said that USAJOBS, the U.S. Government’s official online system for federal jobs and employment information, would be best served by a bidding process between vendors with a track record of designing and successfully managing online job websites.“Since [the re-launch of] the USAJOBS site two weeks ago,...

This is the smartest bunch of people ever to occupy government office. From the WSJ Error: USAJobs.gov Americans in search of federal employment can go to a website called USAJobs.gov, which matches openings with applicants. Since 2004, the feds have outsourced the site's operation to Monster.com. Good call by whoever was in charge in 2004. Monster.com is the private company that pioneered employment websites and is today the largest job search engine in the world. But 18 months ago the "smart" Obama Office of Personnel Management decided the federal government could do a better job of running USAJobs.gov. It spent...

Thai floods hit motor and hi-tech supply chains Published: 25 October 2011 Flooding in Thailand, reckoned to be the worst for fifty years, is disrupting supply chains for a number of major manufacturers. Heavy monsoon rains since July have affected large areas of the country and is now starting to affect Bangkok. More than 360 people have died in the flooding. Toyota has production plants at Samrong, Gateway, and Ban Pho plants. It halted production at the three plants on 10th October as a result of parts-supply delays, although the plants themselves had not been affected. That decision is to...

By Andy Xie 10.14.2011 14:52 Underground Rumblings, then a Financial Quake Private, real economic activities are on shaky ground as high-rate loans, speculation and the state sector surge A real business does not go bankrupt simply because it can't borrow money. But a money-burning speculator does. This fact explains why it's wrong to blame the recent wave of private company bankruptcies in Wenzhou on China's monetary tightening and credit squeeze. The real story is that the companies speculated with borrowed money, and lost. Excessive monetary expansion from 2008-'10 rewarded speculation through asset inflation. The Chinese government's economic stimulus, launched in...

ABC NEWS and iWATCH NEWS Today, 9:47 PM EDT With the approval of the Obama administration, an electric car company that received a $529 million federal government loan guarantee is assembling its first line of cars in Finland, saying it could not find a facility in the United States capable of doing the work. Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the job has been outsourced to Finland.

Decision - Matter of: Technosource Information Systems, LLC; TrueTandem, LLC Finally, our Office also held a hearing in this protest. During the hearing, we again requested that GSA explain the basis for its data center location requirements. In response, GSA repeated that the solicitation had originally limited data center locations to the continental United States, but that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the USTR [United States Trade Representative]considered the limitation restrictive of trade, and advised GSA to permit data centers located in foreign countries. Transcript at 13-14. During the hearing, the contracting officer testified that GSA expressed...

Congress' choice: award a military contract to a Kansas company, or to a government-run Brazilian outfit.The debt deal that President Obama signed on August 2 has sparked an important conversation about aggressive spending cuts in order to avoid a financial crisis. As part of that debt deal, Congress has formed the super committee to make recommendations to cut spending. The Department of Defense will surely have many decisions ahead of them as they are faced with the likely reality that defense programs may be subject to significant cuts from the committee. Recognizing the need for light air support, the Department...

...I’m late on the comments because I am helping a major US corporation once again ship a perfectly running, extremely profitable manufacturing operation overseas. By all means of evaluation, it makes no sense to ship it away. This operation meets all cost targets, highest yield requirements and etc. It is moving because someone has a burr that says we can make it cheaper overseas. Just wait until yields drop, requiring throughput to increase, and increased part costs due to the additional wasted parts that will be bought...

Will work for national honor. We don’t know if the Chinese stonemasons who built the new Martin Luther King memorial got the job by shoving a sign bearing that message into the faces of its overseers. We know only that unpaid, nonunion, foreign nationals built the massive shrine on the Mall. They toiled for “national honor” and “to bring glory to the Chinese people,” one of them explained to an investigator hired by the DC-area stonemasons promised the job. Happy Labor Day! Martin Luther King died in Memphis supporting a strike by the city’s garbagemen. So it’s not a stretch...

The Justice Department is blocking AT&T’s $39 billion deal to buy T-Mobile USA, saying the acquisition of the No. 4 wireless carrier in the country by No. 2 AT&T would reduce competition and raise prices. The deal has faced tough opposition from consumer groups and No. 3 carrier Sprint since it was announced in March. AT&T could challenge the Justice Department’s action in court.

The Obama administration on Wednesday filed to block AT&T's proposed acquisition of wireless rival T-Mobile USA ...

The memorial sits on the National Mall near the Tidal Basin, between memorials honoring Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. It includes a 30-foot-tall sculpture of King and a 450-foot-long granite wall inscribed with 14 quotations from the civil rights leader. The Chinese sculptor Lei Yixin: The Location on The Mall:

The 30ft-tall statue, which forms the centrepiece of a $120 million (£73 million), four-acre memorial to Dr King, opened to the public on Monday on the National Mall in Washington. It is the only memorial on the Mall that does not honour a president or fallen soldiers. Standing in the shadow of the Washington Monument, the statue shows Dr King emerging from a mountain of Chinese granite with his arms crossed and is called The Stone of Hope. However, there has been controversy over the choice of Lei Yixin, a 57-year-old master sculptor from Changsha in Hunan province, to carry...

Politics: These days, what would a firm that outsourced 400,000 U.S. jobs be called? The answer: labor union. Monday's Canada-Colombia free-trade pact is its masterpiece. Leo Gerard, the proudly Canadian president of the United Steelworkers Union, is one of many who ought to stand up and take a bow. He and his fellow Big Labor union bosses loudly opposed the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement, using their political muscle to keep the already-negotiated deal on ice in Congress and the White House for nearly five years. It's come at a massive cost to American workers' jobs. Gerard's native land put its...

Xerox, whose CEO, Ursula Burns, is advising President Obama on exports, last week told its product engineering employees that it is in outsourcing talks with India-based IT services firm HCL Technologies... Burns was appointed last year as vice chairwoman of the President's Export Council, a panel of CEOs advising the Obama administration on how to increase exports, which would lead to an increase in domestic jobs... Burns is outspoken on the need to improve the pool of math and science graduates in U.S. schools. In a recent video interview on CNN, she warned that if graduation rates in these areas...

Goldman Sachs plans major job cuts in the United States while planning a major hiring spree in Singapore. With profits coming under major pressure in the U.S., Goldman appears to be launching possibly the most aggressive effort among big banks to expand overseas where the business climate is more favorable. A major source of trouble for banks and investment firms is the new regulatory environment. Those regulations, found primarily in the Dodd/Frank financial reform bill sponsored by Senator Chris Dodd and his counterpart in the House, Congressman Barney Frank, have forced banks to hold higher capital reserves and also forced...

I often buy a gallon of milk at the convenience store across the street from my job, and take it up to break room to use on cereal or in my coffee. Since my office is a few floors up, I can either take the elevator (which is interminably slow) or walk up the steps (and have everyone else staring at me when I arrive huffing and puffing). I was pondering this choice on one recent trip, when I was struck by a blinding flash of the obvious that saving work is exactly what the elevator is for. My mind...

It's a frustration experienced by most people when they've made phone calls to large companies. An unfamiliar voice answers the phone in a call centre hundreds of miles away where cheap labour is commonplace. But in a reversal of fortunes it now appears that large Indian companies are actually now themselves outsourcing - to U.S. shores. Large corporations that have boomed in India amid the country's nimble economy have been drawn to the U.S. where unemployment has soared. Struggling residents desperate for work are paid between $12 and $14 a hour to be stationed in tiny cubicles for long shifts...

Once upon a time in America, virtually anyone with a high school education and the willingness to work hard could get a good job. Fifty years ago a "good job" would enable someone to own a home, buy a car, take a couple of vacations a year and retire with a decent pension. Unfortunately, those days are long gone. Every single year the number of "good jobs" in the United States actually shrinks even as our population continues to grow. Where in the world did all of those good jobs go? Economists toss around terms such as "outsourcing" and "offshoring"...

China to Overtake U.S. as World Economic Power - Now What? By Steve Tobak | April 28, 2011 Someday, China will overtake America as the world’s largest economy. That appears to be a safe bet. As for when it will happen, what are the implications, and what America’s political and corporate leaders should do about it, that’s a bit more complicated. Or is it? /snip In case anyone’s interested in my input on The Plan, I designate former Intel CEO Andy Grove, one of the most brilliant business and management minds in this great land, as my proxy. Grove thinks...

Boeing illegally put its second 787 Dreamliner assembly line in South Carolina in retaliation for strikes in Washington and should be required to build the line in Washington, according to a National Labor Relations Board complaint filed Wednesday. The board's acting general counsel filed the complaint in response to a charge that the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union District 751, backed by the national union, filed on March 29, 2010. A board administrative law judge is scheduled to hear the case on June 14. The complaint says Boeing executives "made coercive statements to its employees that it...

It was an average sort of beast — gray, thick shouldered, with fat curling horns — spotted from the window of a moving car. But to Giuseppe Mozzillo, who grew up outside Naples in Italy’s buffalo mozzarella heartland, the animals dotting the Indian countryside looked enticingly familiar. “I said, ‘Wait a minute’,” he recalled. “These are the same buffalo. Their original environment is in India. The milk must be amazing. You must be able to make the best mozzarella in the world in India.” ...When he first arrived he was appalled to discover that the local idea of refrigeration often...

Reason.tv: Sandy Springs, Georgia - The City that Outsourced Everything April 12, 2011 While cities across the country are cutting services, raising taxes and contemplating bankruptcy, something extraordinary is happening in a suburban community just north of Atlanta, Georgia. Since incorporating in 2005, Sandy Springs has improved its services, invested tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure and kept taxes flat. And get this: Sandy Springs has no long-term liabilities. This is the story of Sandy Springs, Georgia—the city that outsourced everything. Approximately 8 minutes. Produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning.

Well, it's 3 a.m., the red phone is ringing, people are knocking on the White House door, and nobody's answering. Middle Eastern and North African countries are erupting into violence and there are threats of civil war in Libya. China's huge demand for oil sent its naval ships to the Libyan coast early on. The world is calling for America's help. Gasoline prices are soaring. ObamaCare needs revamping, at a minimum. And, to top it all off, protests over state budget cuts are on the rise. Where is President Obama? All this going on and we're not seeing much leadership...

  The City of Costa Mesa, with a population over 100,000, is about to become 43% closer to the idealized goal of no city workers. In a massive step in the right direction, Costa Mesa to lay off nearly half of city workforce, outsource services. The city of Costa Mesa plans to lay off more than 200 employees and outsource 18 city services by the fall.The layoffs would cut the city's municipal workforce by 43%. The City Council approved the layoffs in a 4-1 vote late Tuesday night, despite nearly unanimous opposition from the audience.City officials said pink slips will...

The common wisdom emerging from the national media frequently notes that the American economy has lost its ability to “make things”…that we lost most of our manufacturing capability to China and to Mexico. The common wisdom notes that we have simply become a nation of hamburger flippers, as well as a nation where we merely trade information with each other. The common wisdom largely adds the U.S. to other formerly powerful nations on the scrap heap of history, a nation whose best days are behind us. The facts are a bit different. Job Losses There is no question that employment...

What’s the No. 1 thing that threatens the future of the U.S.? You might guess radical Islamists, Sarah Palin or President Barack Obama, depending on your personal politics. Or you might say it’s our lack of rigorous education that is, despite federal meddling, leaving many children behind. Or the festering national debt. You might guess a lot of things, but I think it comes down pretty much to one thing: The things that are good for America are not necessarily the same things that are good for big business, and big corporations are more concerned about making profits than in...

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Jobs (In The U.S.) Global Corporate America has decoupled from the American middle class; its interests are now international rather than domestic. Global Corporate America has been decoupling from its country of origin for a long time, and the last weak bonds appear to be snapping. Longtime correspondent Cheryl A. recently submitted this snippet from a recent The Atlantic article The Rise of the New Global Elite and this summary: "This is disturbing on so many levels." The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee...

IN ECONOMICS AS IN APPAREL, most fashions come and go. But like the navy blazer or the little black dress, bewailing the decline of American manufacturing never seems to go out of style. They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracksForeman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back. So sang Bruce Springsteen in "My Hometown," a hit song from his 1984 album, "Born in the U.S.A.". More than a quarter-century later, that sentiment (if not the song) is as popular as ever."You know, we don't manufacture anything anymore in this country," says Donald Trump...

We will never ever develop a country of unleashed entrepreneurs until Americans are unleashed from employer sponsored health care. Not only that but our US industry will never again be competitive with international business until the direct costs of per employee health care are removed from the costs of doing business. How that happens is debatable, but the outcome either pro/con is not debatable. Some may not agree. Employees are tethered to employers and employers are tethered to employees. Health care encourages the best employees and those with an entrepreneurial bent to stay shackled to employers and it encourages US...

The U.S. visa programs that allow companies to hire skilled foreign workers is "out of control" and is costing Americans hundreds of thousands of jobs, according to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute. The H-1B and L-1 visa programs currently account for 1 million guest workers in the United States. Many of these foreign workers are employed at companies that have embraced offshore outsourcing of high-wage, high-tech workers as their primary business model. The top four companies that use the H-1B visa to staff their U.S. operations are Indian outsourcing firms: Infosys, Wipro, Satyam and Tata Consultancy. By bringing...

Catch-22: A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions. The classic and satirical book and movie, Catch-22, perfectly describes the dilemma confronting the Defense Department today as it faces replacing worn-out equipment, conflicting procurement policies regarding the reliance on foreign suppliers and looming budget cuts. Politicians and labor unions demand that the Defense Department buy American when, in fact, the reliance on foreign suppliers has increased sharply in the last decade and is likely to do so even more in the future. The growing influence...

<p>Among the number of plant closings announced in the United States this week: A printing plant in Greenburg, Ind., costing 220 jobs; a tomato processing plant in Westover, Md., with 103 people fired; an office-supply facility in Mattoon, Ill., with 129 jobs lost.</p>

Union Boeing engineers want the plane maker to use the latest delay in its 787 Dreamliner program to reevaluate what the union called a failed outsourcing strategy. Specifically, the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace board Thursday voted unanimously to urge Boeing to use the delay to evaluate parts coming from suppliers and, where appropriate, bring back work that is better performed by Boeing employees. "The outsourcing model has not worked," SPEEA President Tom McCarty said in a news release. "Recently, we've seen a few indications the company wants to reemphasize engineering. SPEEA members have the ability and experience...

With President Obama's state visit earlier this week to India, the role of the government contractor has become an easy target for outsourcing critics backing crowd-pleasing government cost-reduction initiatives. The critical work accomplished by this segment of American industry is being portrayed by some as unnecessary or worse. The fact of the matter is that government contractors are indispensable and always have been. They are the marketplace of ideas and innovation that, in partnership with government, has powered our nation ahead of all others. Outsourcing means enlisting experts from the private sector to perform work for the public sector -...

Anyone critical of President Obama being in India right now is an "idiot," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough bluntly served on his morning show, which prides itself on being a safe haven for different views. India is "exactly where [President Obama] should be" right now, he opined. With Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass on as a guest Monday morning, Scarborough clamored that President Obama "needs" to be in India right now for the sake of U.S. foreign policy. "I would send my President to India, like once a month, if I could, for long weekends," he emphasized. Scarborough hit left-wing...

Obama smoozes India.

WASHINGTON: Top Republican leader John McCain has came out strongly against efforts to "demonise" India as a destination of shipping US jobs, saying there was no "Indian plot to steal American jobs". "We cannot allow our anxieties about globalisation to cause us to demonise India for crass political gain," McCain said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank. "Outsourcing is an inescapable feature of today's global economy, not an Indian plot to steal American jobs, and we should not condone any unfair punishments of Indian workers," McCain said hours ahead of President Barack Obama's India tour.

Trade: In the 2004 election, with the economy in full recovery mode, Democrats launched an all-out attack on outsourcing to win votes. It didn't work. This year, in a much weaker economy, they're trying again. When Democrats made outsourcing a big issue in 2004, the economy was growing at a 3.6% annual rate, thanks to the Bush tax cuts the year before, and unemployment had fallen to 5.5% - on its way to below 4% two years later. The arguments about outsourcing costing Americans their jobs just didn't resonate. The GOP not only added seats in the House and Senate,...

American industry is at the end of a four-decade tail spin. We've reached the point where people talk about a recovery that doesn't bring back factory jobs, or at least gives up some industries for lost. In this light, it's surprising to read a rosy outlook from the NBER about the impact of immigrant labor and offshoring. Both practices have a cost-saving effect, the study finds, that "may leave unaffected, or even increase, total native employment of less skilled workers." Maybe these 11 industries are on the verge of a renaissance, but we think not.

Though some American firms are bringing overseas work back home, evidence is growing that companies are moving more jobs than ever to China and other countries — a trend that could exacerbate efforts to bring down the nation's stubbornly high unemployment rate. One sign of increased offshoring is the rising number of applications for federal Trade Adjustment Assistance, which usually goes to factory workers who lost their jobs because their work was sent overseas or was undercut by cheaper imports. For the six months that ended Sept. 30, workers at about 1,200 offices and plants nationwide were approved for federal...

<p>Cost of the AFL-CIO’s get-out-the-vote efforts for Democrats this November: more than $44 million dollars.</p> <p>AFL-CIO’s creation of an online database to expose U.S. companies that shifted jobs overseas: priceless.</p> <p>At least that’s the AFL-CIO’s hope as it unveils its latest ammunition for the midterm elections: a database of more than 400,000 U.S. companies and subsidiaries it says have shipped jobs overseas, violated workers’ rights, or both.</p>

California Democrat Rep. Jane Harman's family business is laying off American workers - including engineering employees in California - and shifting jobs overseas. A letter from the human resources director of one Harman company, obtained exclusively by The American Spectator, describes a "permanent" layoff of dozens of California workers that went into effect last week. "I am writing to inform you that Harman Consumer, Inc. has decided to consolidate their global engineering operations located at 8500 Balboa Boulevard, Northridge, California 91329, to Shenzhen, China," Sandra Buchanan wrote in the letter dated July 20. "The separation is expected to be on...

Politics: Sen. Barbara Boxer thinks she's struck election gold in California by charging her rival, ex-CEO Carly Fiorina, with outsourcing. The real story is how Boxer has chased millions of jobs out of state with her politics. Last Wednesday's radio debate between California's two senatorial candidates repeatedly circled the issue of jobs in a state with 12.4% unemployment, second highest in the nation. Incumbent Boxer's trump card was that her opponent, while chief of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2006, outsourced jobs. "She laid off 30,000 workers, shipped jobs overseas and says she's proud of her record — well, that's her...

In a move worthy of his favorite candidate, Barack Obama himself, Raj Goyle's new TV ad actually cuts off Mike Pompeo mid-sentence in an attempt to mislead voters. It won't work. Kansans won't be fooled.

One of Sen. Barbara Boxer’s sharpest charges against challenger Carly Fiorina is that, as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she allowed thousands of jobs to be outsourced overseas — depriving U.S. workers of income while piling up profits for executive grandees like herself. Outsourcing of both manufacturing and service jobs has become a wedge issue. It stings especially when times are tough. By Election Day, outsourcing will be portrayed as equivalent to child-molesting in its depravity. But the charge of greed and lack of economic patriotism is disingenuous for a variety of reasons. Remember that outsourcing can be insidious — it knows...