White House: Insource Jobs, Decrease Inequality
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Is it patriotic to ship America’s jobs overseas? President Obama doesn’t think so. He’s right, of course. We live in a globally connected world, but let’s face it: Home-grown corporations must first focus on their own back yards—a novel concept all to many, it seems.
Obama implicitly raised the question yesterday during his Insourcing American Jobs Forum, which featured representatives from more than a dozen large and small businesses that have made decisions to bring jobs to the United States and to increase their investments here.
Pointing to the CEOs in the room, Obama said they ”take pride in hiring people here in America, not just because it’s increasingly the right thing to do for their bottom line, but also because it’s the right thing to do for their workers and for our communities and for our country.
I don’t want America to be a nation that’s primarily known for financial speculation and racking up debt buying stuff from other nations. I want us to be known for making and selling products all over the world stamped with three proud words: “Made in America.” And we can make that happen.
One Union Worker from Omaha Says: We Need ‘Made in America’
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Bill Redler of Omaha, Neb., knows both the hard times of the American construction worker today and the right way forward.
The union plumber, whose first child is on the way, tries not to spend a penny on anything, unless it’s made in America.
“I’ve gotten militant about it, and it turns out that it’s not that hard. We’ve got to quit buying from China. We’ve got to start taxing companies if they want to send jobs to China and then sell products here. That’s the bottom line. We need to be building everything here….Made in America,” he said.
With a Few Clicks, Help Fight Labor Law Abuses
Seth Michaels, a writer at Working America, sends us this.
Working America’s Job Tracker is an online tool you can use to find out about mass layoffs, outsourcing and labor law violations going on right in your neighborhood.
Now, with a few clicks, you help spread the word about what’s really going on in the American workplace. Working America has entered the Job Tracker into the Department of Labor’s informACTION App Challenge—and the voting is open to the public.
Here’s what you do:
Corporations Backing New Trade Deals Outsourced 18,600 Jobs
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Congress will soon consider three so-called free trade agreements (FTAs) between the United States and Korea, Colombia and Panama. Yet because these agreements do not include sufficient protections for workers, passage of these pacts would be a job-killing move at a time when more than 26 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work. The proposed Korea trade deal would cost an estimated 159,000 U.S. jobs alone, according to trade experts who have studied the deal, and its loopholes could open the doors for goods made in China or even sweatshops and North Korea, but labeled in South Korea. (Join the union movement in a national call-in day Oct. 4 to urge lawmakers to vote down these bad trade deals. Watch for more info here in coming days.)
Yet, while corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash and not creating jobs, they’re twisting the knife further into the corpse of the U.S. economy with a new ad campaign pushing for passage of these three deals. And guess what? Some of the 32 corporations backing the campaign have shipped a combined 18,600 U.S. jobs overseas since 2001.
A new searchable database at Public Citizen shows the dirty details. In one case, Whirlpool took Read the rest of this entry »
Corporations Seeking U.S. Tax Breaks Refuse to Reveal Critical U.S. Jobs Data
Major corporations are lobbying heavily for a U.S. tax holiday on their foreign profits. These huge multi-nationals like IBM and Pfizer claim that if they are allowed to repatriate their overseas profits the tax cut—that some say would be as much as $80 billion—will be used to create jobs right here in the United States. Pass the salt shaker.
The Washington Post reports today that most these multinational giants refuse to publicly release information breaking down the exact numbers of U.S. workers versus the number of workers in their overseas operations. Between 2000 and 2009 the companies cut 2.9 million U.S. jobs and created 2.4 million overseas.
Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology told the Post:
It’s an important piece of information that the American people should have. Should you listen to the kind of advice these companies have about how to grow the economy when their record and their model indicates they’ve cut jobs…or should we talk to people who actually do create jobs in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »
Poll: More Manufacturing Can Stop Economic Slide
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In the global economic race, the United States is coming in second—and one of the major reasons is that we have stopped making things in this country. A recent poll shows the public thinks it’s going to be that way for awhile. Only one in five Americans say the U.S. economy is the world’s strongest. Nearly half (47 percent) say China’s economy is stronger and only one in three expects the United States to regain the top spot in the next 20 years. Nearly three-fifths of those surveyed say that increasing competition from lower-paid workers around the world will keep living standards for average Americans from growing as fast as they did in the past.
The poll, conducted for Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor, found that behind the public’s concerns are the related issues of the global economy and the loss of manufacturing jobs. Nearly 60 percent say the nation cannot continue to lose manufacturing jobs.
The uneasiness over the global economy is reflected in responses to the question of whether free trade has been good or bad for the United States. Only college educated whites, people ages 18 to 29 and folks making more than $75,000 think free trade has been good for the nation. Everybody else across racial, economic and education lines are clear that it has not helped.
The main reason people cite for the lack of faith in free trade is that it encourages employers to ship jobs overseas. When asked why manufacturing has declined, 58 percent of respondents say U.S. manufacturers have shifted jobs overseas to take advantage of cheap labor to achieve higher profits.
Lee on C-SPAN: Stop Outsourcing and Rebuild Middle Class
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If the U.S. economy is going to recover from the recession, we must stop exporting U.S. jobs and figure out a way to produce more products here to compete successfully in the global economy. In the past decade alone, more than 5 million manufacturing jobs and 850,000 information sector jobs have disappeared—many of which have been shipped overseas.
Appearing this morning on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” AFL-CIO Deputy Chief of Staff Thea Lee said we need a combination of new policies to create jobs and prevent the flood of jobs moving offshore. We need to change our trade policy, eliminate tax policies that give breaks to companies that move jobs offshore, act to force China’s government and others to halt manipulating their currencies and invest in our own infrastructure and education among other things, she said.
Vote!
It’s crunch time. The polls are open around the country and today’s the day to cast your vote for candidates who will fight for working families—not candidates funded by the corporations that flooded this election year with record amounts of secret contributions.
(Stop back by AFL-CIO Now blog for election coverage. We’ll be covering key results throughout the evening.)
We need lawmakers who believe in keeping jobs in America, not giving tax breaks to corporations that outsource jobs.
We need lawmakers who believe in strengthening, not privatizing, Social Security.
We need lawmakers who believe in tax cuts for the middle class, not millionaires and billionaires.
Vote Nov. 2. Don’t Let Corporate Investment in GOP Pay Off
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Throughout this election season, we’ve chronicled here, here, here and elsewhere, the flood of secret corporate cash aimed at buying the U.S. House and Senate for Republicans.
What is it about the Republican candidates and policies that makes these tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions such an attractive investment?
Well, how about that tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs overseas that Republicans support or their call to revive the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires?
Maybe it is the chance for the Big Banks and financial firms to get their hands on hundreds of billions of dollars if Social Security is privatized. Don’t forget Republican pledges to roll back Wall Street reform, and for the insurance industry, repeal health care reform.
Chamber of Commerce Gets $$ from Big Offshoring Corps.
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It’s long past time for the Chamber of Commerce to take ”U.S.” out of its formal name. Because calling itself the “U.S.” Chamber of Commerce implies it backs the interests of job creation in the United States. And proof emerges again that it does not.
While funding $75 million in political ads to attack the jobs record of lawmakers who support creating good jobs in this country, the Chamber is pushing to send jobs overseas to outsourcing companies that are funding its political attack ads.
This from Think Progress:
While it tells the American public it cares about American jobs, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce actually works to send jobs overseas on behalf of its corporate members, which include some of Asia’s top offshoring companies. As ThinkProgress previously noted, the Chamber has repeatedly sent out issue alerts attacking Democratic efforts to encourage businesses to hire locally rather than outsource to foreign countries. The Chamber has also bitterly fought Democrats for opposing unfettered free trade deals.
The Chamber’s anti-American jobs agenda serves…the profit-seeking of right-wing corporate executives in the United States….
Those in Washington, D.C., might want to go by the Chamber’s HQ, across from the White House, to view the “Jobs” banners hanging ostentatiously off its marble facade.
It’s worth the laugh.
