With all the discussion about the scarcity of jobs, why is this not discussed?

The first one can be countered by fierce penalties for domestic companies that manufacture overseas, to make it too expensive for them to outsource to slave labour countries and then import.

@ragingloli Good idea, but that would interfere with the businesses freedom to make as much money as they can. And that’s most important to a lot of people. (I’m not mentioning any political parties in the US, but I wish people would notice what motivates various groups)

@Sunny2 business freedom to make as much money as they can?

That is a falisy, You give a corporation corporate status and protection from individual lawsuit because society will benefit from shared effort in a profit making enterprise. It is only of late that certain people have confused corporation privileged with “interest of shareholders”.

I think the problem started with the NAFTA agreement.

The “problem”, as many seem to want to think of it, is that unless you own the company, you don’t have a property right in a job. That is, no one owes you or any of your neighbors a job. But people tend to think of jobs as something that they’re personally invested in. As long as you work for wages, you should realize that “jobs” are a function of capital + labor. If the capital isn’t available, then it doesn’t matter how willing the labor force is, there won’t be a job. (The rest of the world has known this for a long time. It’s time that more in the US and Europe understood it as well.)

As Mark Knopfler sang in Telegraph Road:
I used to like to go to work but they shut it down
I’ve got a right to go to work but there’s no work here to be found

You absolutely have a right to go to work. No one can take that away from you for no cause. But no one owes you (or me) “a job”. That you have to earn and keep by being more valuable to someone who has the right to give it to whoever he wants to. You could always make your own, but it will involve you coming up with the capital and then dealing with the labor. When your labor force seems to think that they’re doing you a favor by showing up and doing anything, the capital can get scarce.

And it’s not just “greedy employers” searching for rock bottom prices. They answer to customers (other business, mainly) and directly to consumers (all of us) who are also greedily seeking lowest cost. As a matter of fact, whether you want to agree with this or not, the outsourcing of jobs to lower cost parts of the world benefits us all, and not just as consumers. As other parts of the world become more affluent, they are more able to purchase the things that we make and still export – and we export a great deal. You don’t necessarily see that because you’re not shopping for high-value machine tools, excavation and other construction equipment, farm machinery, locomotives and aircraft, for example. But we make those things in great abundance in this country – even though the rest of the world can (and does) make them as well, and we export them to free markets everywhere. And it’s a good thing for us that the rest of the world is getting richer, because that does keep us in these export markets, which wouldn’t even exist if the rest of the world was still starving.

In addition to that, “when goods don’t cross borders, armies do”. I’m very pleased to see the US in friendly, peaceful (even if cutthroat) business competition with the rest of the world. It sure as hell beats some of the other ways we’ve been forced to “compete” from time to time.

I agree that it’s temporarily painful and wrenching to lose a job that you’ve held for a long time (I’ve done it several times myself, and I know how painful it can be), but long term, it’s all good.

@CWOTUS I understand your point of view, but it seems muddled to me. I do not know that many who outsource jobs to other counties are risking their own earned capital. Those that I do know who have outsourced jobs are working for large firms which are incorporated, protecting their shareholders from real loss due to malfeasance of the company.

And again, corporate status does imply a duty to the community. Otherwise society has no benefit in shielding a shareholder from civil liability for the acts of a corporate entity.

At some point, corporate leadership have convinced otherwise intelligent people that they are to be as admired as those who risk their own capital and reputation in establishing small business. This is laughable, and has ensnared to many otherwise intelligent folk into championing corporate leadership as something other than parasitic parts of our economy.

Are you sure that it’s not your thinking that’s muddled, @Imadethisupwithnoforethought? The corporation has its own capital. It has to employ it to its own best advantage, within the rules of the jurisdiction where it “resides”. That is, it has resources that it can employ (including both capital and willing labor). And since it has freedom of association, again, within the limitations of its jurisdiction, it can choose to deploy some of those resources where the investment will make the biggest return. It’s not like employers “give away” jobs; they buy labor and goods, and they make the best buys that they can, just like you and I do. (I think this is one of the things that makes us good citizens, in fact, that we not waste money attempting to do foolish things such as support failed enterprises and inefficient, unproductive or too-expensive labor. Workers cannot be hothouse flowers that need endless “support” to be viable. They have to be able to produce when they’re fed and watered no more than “adequately”.)

That’s why one of my jobs right now is teaching Indians how to do my job. I’m paid pretty well for that (better than the Indians, at least for now). One of the problems that we have, in fact, is that as the Indians we train become more proficient in Western ways of doing business, they become more valuable to other Indian employers, who often hire them away from us.

I feel no ill will to Indians (or Chinese; I’ve helped to train them, too) attempting to better their situations, and I feel no ill will to my employer for attempting, as much as it’s possible for them right now, to obtain my skills for half the price. Good luck to ‘em. It won’t be likely for a good long while, from what I’ve seen, and by that time my Indian equivalent may be earning about as much as I am. Then we can forget about competing on price alone, which is the only shorthand measuring stick available, since it’s harder to measure “long term value” unless you’re a direct participant in the exchanges, and we’ll compete on schedule + quality + productivity when price appears to be more or less equal.

At least, we’ll be able to do that if we haven’t wrecked our own economy in the meantime as we let Washington try to keep “fixing” it. It’s not broken.

Outsourcing jobs is never going to stop as long as consumers look for the bargain prices. So unless you are paying top dollar for American made, then you are part of the problem. Other factors influence this as well, but I think that is one of the major contributors.

In so far as technology reducing labor needs, I reckon that has been going on since the wheel was invented, then one guy could pull the load instead of 10 carrying it. My grandfather didn’t need as many helpers on the farm when tractors replaced horses, and on and on.

Bottom line, there are no simple answers and the blame game is counterproductive.

I have a friend that works for ADP – the payroll company that news organizations refer to their data regarding job growth – and they are outsourcing many jobs to the Phillipines! The US employees were offered to fly over there to train their replacements. ~nice~

@CWOTUS, I agree 100 percent. Excellently written. I don’t understand how on one hand someone can want what is good for humanity and talk about global rights and lifting up the poor and impoverished, but on the other hand; they can’t understand how outsourcing to other countries can be good for everyone. How it gets twisted to slave labor is fascinating to me.

Thank you.

On the other hand, sometimes it is essentially slave labor if prisoners are forced to work for below-market wages on goods that are sold in the world market, or no “wages” at all other than the sustenance to keep them alive and in prison. But it’s a fallacy to equate “all Chinese wage-earners” as “slave labor” just because a relative handful of them really are.