Some attention is being given to an only partly humorous video from reason.tv which takes a fairly disparaging look at American reactions to various labor threats. The phrasing is worth noting:
Sometimes the threat comes from China, Japan, or outsourcing to India. Today, it’s NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement—you know, all those Mexicans taking our jobs.
The article then goes on to quote Drew Carey ranting about “the robot threat.”
“Now, think about it,” says Reason.tv host Drew Carey. “How are we supposed to compete against something that doesn’t get paid, doesn’t get health insurance, and never goes on breaks?”
“No job is safe from the robot threat!”
A couple of the usual sources have a good guffaw over this. (Give a wave to James Joyner and Professor Bainbridge.) However, the subtext of the original article follows an all too common theme. Anyone expressing concern over the so called “free trade” (which is quite obviously unfair trade in a cheap costume) effects on workers in the United States should immediately be lumped in with Luddites and those fretting over “brown skinned people sneaking over the border and taking our jobs.” The fact, of course, is that we’re talking about three very different issues here.
While many of us maintain a soft spot in our hearts for John Henry’s epic struggle against the rise of the machine age, the Luddite movement was dead before it was fully born. Worries about illegal immigrants sneaking over the border at night to “steal our jobs” is yet another distraction. Few, if any, high end, lucrative jobs are going to be filled by undocumented migrant workers. The real issue there speaks to a failure to enforce existing employment laws and is a discussion for another day.
The true annoyance here is the obvious conflation of the above two scenarios with the very real issue of job outsourcing and the government’s reaction to it. Anyone thinking that such things don’t happen or are the griping of “old world thinkers” who are standing in the way of progress and globalization are simply in denial. The issue is real and it confronts us today. Advancements in technology have allowed telecommuting to provide great benefits in a wide variety of areas. These include computer application development, engineering, CAD/CAM, graphics design and customer service among others. But far too many large corporations immediately made the jump from “remote working” to “very remote working” by handing these jobs off to basement rate cheap labor markets.
Usually these transitions come in the form of attractive sounding “offers” where employees are informed that their positions are being reallocated to “global resources.” The “offer” ensures that the worker will be given first choice for other, parallel positions inside the company or the lure of a “bridge to early retirement.” The reality, of course, is that other positions are scarce when every department is under similar pressure to globalize. The offer of “retirement” is not attractive to people who were still years from their target retirement date. More often than not the workers find themselves – well into middle age – suddenly tossed out into a fiercely competitive labor market and winding up in positions where they have to learn entire new sets of technical jargon involving phrases like, “grande, latte and half-caf.”
At the same time, many of these companies are recording record profits while collecting huge tax benefits at both the federal and state levels. Take a look at the list of companies, many of which are heavy hitters in the job outsourcing debacle, who wound up paying ZERO taxes in 2007 while sending our jobs overseas.
The survey said the following 16 companies, whose profits ranged from $42 million to $2.9 billion, paid no Federal tax last year: I.B.M., General Motors, Aetna Life and Casualty, Baxter Travenol Laboratories, Carolina Power and Light, Illinois Power, Corning, Hewlett-Packard, Ashland Oil, Greyhound, Ogden, Sequa, Pennzoil, Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Consumers Power and Gulf States Utilities.
It is not the Federal government’s place to tell industry who and where they can hire workers. But by the same token, the Feds are under no obligation to give such huge benefits to the worst offenders. When you operate your company in the country which made it possible for you to achieve such success, you have a responsibility to give something back to that country. Make a profit? Yes. But you owe some loyalty beyond the circle of your board of directors and largest investors. You also owe some loyalty to the workers who helped you get there. The government needs to stop turning a blind eye to this. Incidentally, this is a subject which John McCain gets wrong, Obama gets occasionally right (but then often back peddles in his next speech) and Bob Barr nails right on the head.