Monthly Archives: June 2010

Outsourcing insanity

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When it comes to this outsourcing insanity, it doesn’t just stop with computer professionals. Any job using computers is at risk: Accounting. Order taking. Computerized factory floor. Even debt collection.

How appropriate–after a corporation electronically brings in a migrant to do your job, they’ll electronically bring in another to harass you as you go broke.

It is such a drain on our economy that any sane person has to ask: Why do we have to let those jobs go?

Of course, we don’t. But large corporations want it. It gives them an advantage over small companies. They can sell to Americans but not hire Americans. These corporations pay enough in campaign bribes to get their way–and the correct term is bribes. The campaign money comes with strings even if the Supreme Court can’t see it, yet any fool outside the Court’s ivory tower knows that what looks, works and stinks like a bribe, is a bribe. Those bribes grease the way for multinational conglomerates that prefer to ignore national boundaries.

Yet the jobs exist. The jobs are here. Americans could be doing them.

So there’s no law.

It’s our border. These are our jobs.

We can make a law.

Our politicians may think that they work for the multinationals ninety-nine percent of the time, but they still need our votes, even if it’s only once every few years. As a matter of fact, they need our votes this year.

Maybe our politicians have forgotten that?

Maybe we should remind them?

A footnote for 2020:  One might get the impression that I don’t like immigrants or foreigners. I hope not. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are people, just like you and me. I’ve trained and work with any number of people working in India, as well as worked and work with lots of immigrants.  Though I resented the company firing Americans to hire in a foreign country, I still found and do find I like my Indian compatriots. Today, of course, after driving so many Americans out of Information Systems, the mostly likely candidate for a job in America is an immigrant.  I have some Indian friends who have become citizens and now live with the threat of their job going overseas.  So at least the corporate hate for jobs in America applies to everyone in America.

It’s not the people in the jobs.  It’s the destruction of the American economy as a substitute for knowing how to run a business that gripes me.

This, I think, is the major reason for President Trump’s unpopularity with Big Tech. They are the worst offenders at building companies with Americans and our tech and then firing the Americans to make themselves even richer.

Where are the jobs?

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(A note for 2020:  This was published in 2010.  Donald Trump was elected by American voters 4 years ago to help put a stop to this.  For this, and for not being a career bribe taker, President Trump has been painted as a bastard every day since.  Joe Biden promises to send the work back overseas.  The media loves Joe.  Big surprise, all this, right?)

Fifteen months after passage of the jobs bill beyond belief, after massive expenditures on extended unemployment, after a monumental load of debt taken on to stimulate the economy in America, where are the jobs?

China.  India.  Egypt.  Pakistan.

Why?

Because it only takes one job taken by an electronic migrant to eliminate about a half-dozen American jobs.  What is an electronic migrant?  Someone who works here but sits across the border, entering this country over the phone and the network wires.  This the unmentioned part of our migrant workforce–unregulated, unwatched, utterly ignored by Washington, and yet taking many of our best jobs.

It used to be just the big companies played in this dirt.  But with years of practice, now the little companies are involved.  I know of a small outfit in Pennsylvania that traditionally operated with about a 10% annual profit.  Recently, they were purchased by an overseas firm (courtesy of our crashed economy, everything is cheap here).  Now the word is that only a 25% profit will do.

How is that to be accomplished?  Easy.  Lay off the Americans and bring in electronic migrants.  Outsourcing, they call it.  And for each American that goes, another five, six or more Americans up and down the street goes with them.

What happens is that the primary unemployed–the first laid off–are not buying furniture, going on vacation, spending on clothes, whatever.  At some point, one of the people doing those other jobs also gets a pink slip.  And then another and another.  It all adds up.  The tens and hundreds of thousands of jobs outsourced each year to electronic migrants mean millions of jobs lost in retail, food service, tax preparation, large and small industry, and on and on.

Do we have to let those jobs go?  Absolutely not.  The work is still here, and we could have those jobs without borrowing and spending another dollar of national debt, dollars we steal from our children and grandchildren.  It is very simple.  After all, it is our border and these are our jobs.  We regulate everything else that comes in and goes out, so we can make a law.  We can do it any time.

In a sad, twisted way, all the spending has worked.  No one, not even the federal government, can spend that much money without somebody getting hired.  But for every job we might make, we open our border to another electronic migrant.  The best jobs, the jobs the politicians yap endlessly about creating, are the ones we give away.  If you look for healthy economies, you’ll find them in China and India, growing on the payrolls of their electronic migrants.

The sad bottom line is that our government, and our money, subsidizes the economies in Asia–and does this even as we are unemployed, going broke, and dumping our debt on our children.

I can’t say that I am impressed.

Are you?