Posted on 11/10/2003 2:48:21 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
The quickening flight of high-tech and white-collar service jobs has always represented the ultimate betrayal of the American worker by globalization. For years, globalization cheerleaders described the hemorrhage of manufacturing jobs as acceptable and even welcome because American workers would be retrained for the higher-paying, knowledge-based “industries of the future” –- especially the research and development, design, and engineering needed to produce cutting edge goods and services.
Starting during the tech boom, though, U.S. technology companies made clear that the “higher paying” part wasn´t on their agenda. By pumping up the number of technologically skilled immigrants allowed into the country and outsourcing growing numbers of tech jobs abroad, these firms are well on their way to guaranteeing that whatever jobs of the future remain in America pay as little as possible.
Worse, in the process, they´re discouraging more and more young Americans from studying science and technology, and thus encouraging a dangerous dumbing-down of the nation´s future workforce. Try preserving superpower status after a generation or two of that.
This year, technology and other white-collar outsourcing has become so widespread, and the economy´s job-creating powers have become so feeble, that the issue has become front-page news and the public is revolting. Like their counterparts in the rest of the economy, the multinational tech-outsourcers and their apologists have begun to react with a combination of almost refreshingly honest arrogance and insultingly incoherent deception.
In the former category, tech industry spokesman Harris Miller takes first prize. President of the Information Technology Association of America, Miller spent the late 1990s insisting that America faced a tech worker shortage so enormous that only a flood of immigrant techies could fill the gap. He also warned that, without such tech worker imports, these firms would send the jobs overseas.
Now, as unemployment in technology still tops 8 percent despite months of better economic growth, Miller has shifted toward defending outsourcing as a “hard truth” that Americans must face. The nation´s main hope for stemming this job flight? As Miller told Congress, “downward pressure on salaries.” In other words, U.S. technology workers should plunge deeper into the global race to the bottom.
More funding for technology education would help, too, he added. But Miller was surely relieved that no Congressmen asked him how this would improve America´s competitiveness with foreign workers who he argued can “compete for increasingly more sophisticated and complex IT work” at “a fraction” of U.S. costs.
A similar message was broadcast in October by Robert Jones, former head of the National Alliance of Business. In Jones´ view, Americans have enjoyed high living standards because in the half century after World War II, “the United States had a monopoly on the world´s economy and set up costly health benefits systems and pay patterns.”
Although most Americans applaud this record of turning tens of millions of families into a prosperous middle class, Jones interpreted it differently: “We became spoiled.”
Jones, too urged major national educational reform – mainly requiring all high school graduates to pass four years of math and science. But he never explained why this would preserve American wage premiums when by his own account, “India, China, Indonesia are investing huge amounts in education to the sole purpose of becoming major producers for the world, not just for us.”
Setting the standard for incoherent deception has been former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who has long successfully masqueraded as a champion of American workers despite supporting nearly every globalization policy that has pummeled their living standards.
In a November 2 Washington Post article, Reich claimed that high-tech outsourcing is nothing “to lose sleep over.” Some of Reich´s arguments simply parrot the by-now-bewildering and transparently chauvinistic confidence that only the “more standard” high tech work will be outsourced. Americans allegedly will keep monopolizing “more innovative, higher value-added functions such as invention, creation, integration, key R&D, and basic infrastructure.”
Reich also trots out his tired mantra that, “just as with laid-off manufacturing workers,” reeducation and training will be keys for ensuring “that high tech workers are adaptive and flexible” and employable. Never mind that, even if successful retraining programs did exist in the United States, the superstar tech jobs he believes Americans can still dominate are by definition few and far between.
But what truly amazes about Reich´s pollyanism is how heavily it depends on ignoring basic economics. The new wrinkle in his shtick is that, “There´s no necessary limit to the number of high tech jobs around the world because there´s no finite limit to the ingenuity of the human mind” and “no limit to human needs that can be satisfied.”
Reich is obviously right in an abstract sense. But economics (not to mention common sense) tells us that demand for products and services will not actually generate products and services unless the demandeurs have money to spend.
Policies that gut the ranks of America´s best-paying jobs and slash the compensation of survivors (as Reich admits and Harris Miller hopes for) can only shrink the U.S. economy´s sources of sustainable demand. And don´t look to countries like India to compensate. For all the U.S. tech jobs this Asian giant has received, wages there will go nowhere as long as 25 percent of university grads – the high tech labor pool – are unemployed.
This, then, is the answer that globalization cheerleaders have for high tech job flight: Cut high tech pay, cut health care systems to pre-1930s levels, promise all American workers that they can become another Einstein or Gates, and spend who knows how much money on this fool´s quest. Spreading this claptrap is contemptible. Taking it lying down would be unforgivable.
Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation and the author of The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards (Westview Press).
Yes they certainly are.
Yeah, I know what you mean.
Not much difference between Robert Reich and Robert Zoellick, is there?
Kinda like two rotten peas out of the same pod.
I will pay more, if neccessary to buy American products.....and I will check the labels fom now on!
The scuttlebut has it that the Commander-In-Chief thinks that if the grunts don't like it, they can drip-dry.
Former Silicon Valley hardware design engineer ... out 13 months out of the last 24.
Outsourcing of Information Technology jobs is so small right now and it's hard to foresee this becoming a really major problem in the future. With the huge number of retirements we'll be seeing in the USA from the aging of the baby-boomers, there will be moderate to severe worker shortages in I.T. and elsewhere starting in just a couple of years, and growing throughout the decade.
One insightful article about this said, "The shame about outsourcing to India isn't that it takes so many jobs, but that it can't possibly fill the gap we'll see here at home."
For all of it's huge population, India has a much smaller pool of this skilled labor than we do. Add to that, they don't have enough infrastructure (building parks, communications, I.T. support) to absorb even 5% of American I.T. requirements. To be honest, even though I'm a 30-year veteran of I.T. and don't want to lose my job--I look forward to India, and China, and Russia, achieving middle-class status as soon as they can.
We here in the States have all of the advantages of the very best jobs if we keep our skills up to date. Ross Perot, Jr. was quoted in a local newspaper last month as saying that he and his dad do outsource inceasingly to India, but he said: "It you have good I.T. skills, you'll have no problem in the coming job market--if you have so-so skills, you're not very secure."
I don't think so.
Many of the Boomers were purged by H-1Bs before the offshoring kicked in full-swing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.