Monthly Archives: September 2009

Offshored and outsourced — lies our corporations tell us

Posted on by

What would you think if a manufacturing plant, one somewhere along our coast, parked a ship full of illegal immigrants twelve miles offshore and then ran a bundle of rods, cables and levers from that ship to their plant so that the foreigners could operate the machinery?

It would be obvious that the plant owner was breaking immigration laws.  Even if a loophole was found for the owner to slither through, the stink would be so great that the practice wouldn’t be practiced for long.

But with a little trickery, some smoke, mirrors and curtains, this operation is being run.  And the stink is kept so far offshore that you don’t catch the smell. You are most likely to notice when it is your job that is gone.

Last year, one “American company” unloaded the better part of 24,000 U.S. workers by exactly this means. That company was far from alone. Mind you, the work is not gone. The work is here, in this country, just as it always has been.  Though the foreigners are not sitting just offshore, the rods, cables and levers do run from plants and offices inside our border into the ocean but reach all the way to places like India, China and Egypt. The work still appears here and the products are directly used here, but the worker sits at an electronic console, and the rods, cables and levers run though wires on the internet and do it so smoothly that no one notices the remote control.

It is a clever scheme. The companies successfully avoid U.S. laws on immigration. They use our country’s resources, our infrastructure, and the wealth and order that our social systems have produced, but they manage to avoid most of the contribution we expect from companies that depend upon and use our society.  They avoid the local, state and federal taxes, the employee taxes, the social security taxes and the medicare taxes.  More than that, they avoid the contribution made by the payroll, and with that they cut off all the secondary jobs that a payroll would have supported.  There is no money for the local grocery, restaurant or gas stations.  No money for haircuts, none for lawn mowers, none for books nor for schools, and not any for new clothes or even old.

These corporations need Americans to buy their products but the fewer Americans they can employ, the happier they are. They need American money but not American expense. They take but do their best to not give back.

They want the use of our society, but they do not want to support our society.

A sane person calls this one-sided operation stealing. The companies call it outsourcing or offshoring, claiming that the work is done overseas. That argument is, at best, debatable, and in many ways, simply a lie.  Just consider for a moment: Where does the work result occur?  Here.  The computers being monitored are?  Here.  The systems being changed are?  Here.  The products appear?  Here.

Only the body of the worker sits offshore. If that internet goes down–the work will not be done. It cannot be done–because the work product is here. The production occurs here. The end result happens here.

Just the same as if the machine sat at the end of rods and levers.

What do you think the People’s Republic of China would say if multinational corporations proposed moving offshore millions of the best jobs in China?  Keep in mind that the machines and computers and end results would stay in China, but all the payrolls, all the taxes, all the knowledge and all the skills would be moved overseas.

Do you think the People’s Republic would approve?

Would any country concerned with its own destiny allow this?

Do you need any time to come up with that answer?

Me neither.

Yet in our country, our politicians, apparently for the sake of campaign contributions, have allowed the shipment of millions of our best jobs overseas and continue to allow the sending away of tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs each year.  And with them go hundreds of thousands and millions of secondary jobs that wither away when those primary payrolls no longer flow through the rest of our economy.

Corporations want this debate to center only on the issue of where the operator’s body sits.  Where the work product materializes is an issue they dismiss.  The multinational corporation’s concern is only in what allows them the most profit.

Yet societies that wish to survive must deal with the broader definition of profit–the definition that has to do with the health of their society.

Since these corporations and their businesses ultimately depend upon our society, and our society must determine and act for its own survival, it is our society’s right to decide how to deal with these offshoring operations.  This is not an abstract point.  It is our citizens, these are our jobs, it is our economy, and it is our future that are at stake.

Truly, it seems there is only question:  Why do such operations continue?

* * *

Too many companies too clearly envision a world with what they call a level playing field. But what they mean by that is a world where all the workers live in huts made of tin and scraps, where all the employees are terrified of the shop boss, where all the workers are less than slaves, just bodies to be used and discarded. Apparently, for them, there should be two classes of people:  the very, very rich and the very, very poor.  To them, the average American’s quality of life is an insult, speaking only of money wasted on pay to workers when that money should properly be in the coffers of the elite.

The effects of those who take but do not pay are apparent, and the quality of life for the average American has fallen.

Of course, this behavior could not exist had we not allowed it.  I am as guilty as any.  I once advocated free trade, back when I believed the lie that the goal was to improve the lives of our Mexican neighbors, to relieve the need for them to illegally cross our borders to find work.

Now I wonder how I could have been that stupid. It seems clear that the goal always was, and remains, the degradation and return to slavery of the working man, the average citizen, all of us who do not sit on the Board or speculate with billions on Wall Street.

This is the critical fact that almost everyone has missed: Every job that involves a computer is on the list to be setup for remote control from overseas. Whether you are an accountant, take orders in a store, or punch into a console on the manufacturing line. Look around a bit harder and you will find it happening. So far as the multinational corporations are concerned, your job belongs where it can be done cheapest and to hell with you, your loved ones, your community and your country.

These multinational corporations are, in fact, scavengers, and we, our society and our country, are the body upon which they feed.

As our economy limps through this recession, we need to remember that the last time the geniuses on Wall Street totally bunged up the works, there was at least the hope that the jobs would be revived. Today companies are setting up remote-control operations and sending work overseas as quickly as they can, quite clearly precipitating, accelerating, and maintaining the current decline. Tens of thousands have been laid off and are being laid off every month, even every week, not because there is no work, but because there is no work for Americans in America. There is only work for foreigners doing American work.

Indeed, Wall Street demands that the jobs be sent offshore. After all, how can American businesses thrive if Americans are working?

What?  Can Wall Street be that stupid?  If no American works, there is no American pay, no money, no products purchased, and all the companies die!  How can the imbecility of that logic not ping off a person’s head like a bowling ball from the fourth floor?

And why is it that our legislators do not feel that thud?  Are they cushioned by all those lovely, thick mounds of campaign dollars?

The people on Wall Street are not financial geniuses.  If the last few years are not proof enough, we have centuries of evidence.  Too many, apparently the majority, are either imbeciles or criminals.  Their financial and stock operations need to be viewed in that context.

These identical masterminds, those who gave us Black Tuesday, the dot-com crash and the sub-prime fiasco, are now engineering their greatest escapade ever–the reduction of the American worker to french-fry cooks, gatherers of lost shopping carts, and of course, to the unemployed. How far will the economy fall, and will there ever be a recovery, since the skilled and manufacturing jobs are going, gone, and promised to never, ever be here again?

I predict that the fall will be pretty damn far.

Here is a litmus test for your Federal representatives–your Senators, your Congressmen and your President: Do they support immediate action to  create laws and restrictions on work done remotely? If they don’t, then you know at once that they do not believe that they work for you. They believe that they work for their multinational, corporate paymasters.

You should ask the question of your representatives.

I’d like to know what you find out.

Wouldn’t you?

Education and the devaluation of competence

Posted on by

I was in a conversation, actually another blog thread, the other day on the subject of job education requirements.

I think education is a fine thing. Everyone should have one as a child. They can learn how to keep it dusted and when to haul it out to impress the relatives.

At least that’s the case with education as it is practiced in the USA.

Now, if you want to talk about Education, as in learning a subject for competence, able to demonstrate skill, ability to produce a predictable result. Hell, I’m all for that too. I just wish we had such a thing.

In my earlier conversation, the one that started this ramble, we had as our subject the Information Technology industry, one I have been familiar with for the last twenty years. When I started, it had been possible for someone to walk in, demonstrate competence, and have a job. Especially when the personal computers exploded onto the market, many of the arbitraries got set aside and competence, willingness, skill and ability to learn could outweigh any lack of paper credentials.

Those days are done.

Today we drown in vast pools of paper experts. People whose qualification is that they managed to sit through four or six or eight years of college, people whose qualification is the diploma, the certificate, the paper–also known as the ticket. Their parent’s money didn’t run out. They were able to get enough loans. And the school looked the other way at drunken binges that had a good percentage of the student body barfing on street corners two or three or four nights out of seven.

Often the subjects taught and the degree obtained are in a field of complete uselessness, completely dreamed up, unproven, unworkable and not needed. Professions whose practitioners leave destruction and confusion in their wakes. Psychologists and MBA’s come to mind, but they are far from alone. Even the technical subjects require no demonstration of competence, no hard measure of skill. All that matters is getting the paper at the end, the ticket.

These paper tigers gravitate to positions where no hard product is seen, where failure is always due to the environment or business conditions or whatever. In those environments, all that matters is the ticket.

When the ticket is the only qualification one has, defense of the ticket’s value becomes a very, very serious thing. Allowing the merely competent, the ticketless, to work or advance demonstrates rather dramatically the real value of the ticket. For those in this age of ignorance, our new age of ignorance, whose only qualification is the ticket, requirements for competence or skill cannot be allowed to threaten the value of that piece of paper.

At times in my career, I have been in the position of interviewing applicants–and in the process turning away four year IT degree holders who were clueless. I remember taking one aside, telling him to buy a computer and learn how to use it.

Could he have learned this in school? Sure, if he had demanded of himself that he learn. But it was not required by the school. At the same time, I had applicants who had taught themselves. Being a practicing professional myself, I was in the position to judge whether the self-taught knew their stuff.

Very often they did.

I’m sure you can guess which I hired.

This, of course, could only go on for so long, especially in large companies. There is a group of people who should properly spend their time filing papers with the government and making sure paychecks are for the proper amounts. They used to be called the “Personnel Department.” It was an honest name for an honest function. However, there’s no ring to that, not much of a claim to power.

Today, as part of their move to the center stage, they are called Human Resources. Replete with a complete and dazzling set of pseudosciences, they now demand respect.

One of the primary functions of Human Resources is to ensure that the tickets are respected. It is not hard to understand why. Each of the HR mucky-mucks advances, if they advance, primarily on the value of their own ticket. It has to be so because the jobs they hold have almost no valid measure of performance. Worse, if the jobs were required to be validly measured, it would have to be done by HR personnel, who typically have no clue how to do such a task.

When it comes to technical fields, such as computer systems, HR people, being as intentionally ignorant of the Information Technology as they are of the details of any industry, are compelled to insist on the paper–this protects the value of their own tickets and gives them something with which to cover their behinds when a new hire fails.

When I wanted entrance into the industry, even twenty years ago, some kind of degree, even a minimal one, was already becoming part of the dues. Having by then been in that exact fight a few times, I swallowed my pride and spent the few years to get the piece of paper. Not that my time in school was a complete waste—I met my wife there. But my IT skills? Those I learned of desire and necessity. Though I picked up a few new skills while in college and the school (to their credit) made it easier to do, I would have acquired the skills anyway if needed–I already knew more than most grads when I started my classes.

Since then one of the saddest things I have seen is doors closing on bright, talented people because they are not in the club.

This reflects a continuing degradation in society, a calcification visible not just in the IT field. When it comes right down to it, we’re not very far from hereditary positions. How far? I don’t know. One generation? Probably not. Two? Three? Five? Maybe. The point is that once competence is thrown out as the key job requirement, the rest comes easy. Many parents want a sure thing for their drooling children. Virtually the entire cycle of royalty was, after the initial power grab, no more than that–seeing to it that junior did not have to compete and did not have to earn a place. We have the same motives in action today, buried under different guises and names, but with the exact same intent.

In every society there are parasites. The longer the society is in place, the more chances the parasites have to find a way to do their leaching. Our society is no different.

Historically, this is all very predictable. Yet is not a pleasant thing to watch.