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There are a FEW solutions to the offshoring problem, many of which require some kind of foresight on the part of politicians and business leaders.
Ideally, the first thing that should happen would be for US CEO's to . . . and I'm just spitballing here, stop being so damned GREEDY, but since that's never going to happen -
* Stop giving tax incentives to corporations to move jobs/companies abroad. Byron Dorgan had a bill on this very issue (S 1284).
* Make it illegal for venture capitalists to be allowed to tell start-ups who they're required to hire.
* Push forward legislation that technologies developed by taxpayer-funded research (as virtually everything is) can be licensed only to American companies using local labor for, say, 10 years.
* Organize. Why there are so few labor unions for white collar workers is beyond me completely. I know there's WashTech or AEA, but there needs to be more.
* Keep or lower the caps on H1-b/L1 visas.
* Bring manufacturing back to the US in lower-cost areas. A weak nation is one that has no solid manufacturing base.
* Decide that companies with a large percentage of their workforce located overseas no longer qualify for lucrative "American-only" federal contracts.
* You start more pro-worker legislation and curb offshoring sharply, it will encourage more collegiate entries into the science and math fields. Common Sense 101: You can't expect kids to take up a career field when you're not giving them a single incentive (i.e. offshoring tech jobs, R&D, etc) to do so. No ROI, no math/science enrollment. It's that simple. Kids often ain't as stupid as you politicians are.
* Stop electing pro-corporate, anti-small-business, anti-employee and anti-union dickheads like the ones currently polluting the Blight House and Congress.
The Bush administration, however, isn't doing a damned thing to stop this practice. To add insult to injury, it is pushing to expand trade treaties under terms that will make it even easier for CEOs to get even richer by shipping more jobs overseas.
I also don't buy the canard of "retraining" since it doesn't often work in the real world. Increased globalization has reduced the lag time between the initial development of new technologies and the offshoring of most related jobs. It took more than 50 years between the invention of the automobile and the outsourcing of car production to low-wage countries. But even if American labs produce breakthroughs in new fields such as nano- and biotech, the vast majority of work -- both technical and production -- is already being sent abroad quickly. No amount of training will help us when those jobs leave the country.
If politicians know that retraining can't work, why do they continue to promote it? Easy: It gets the public off their backs. Instead of blaming the government, or the corporations that have eliminated so many jobs, the logic of "retraining" is to blame the victim. If you're out of work, don't complain, because IT'S YOUR FAULT. Just buck up and take responsibility for getting the skills you need. Ownership society truly does mean "You're on your own". If economists, industry pundits and financial analysts cannot point to a single industry that's creating a great deal of jobs and is sustainable for the time being, how is the average American worker expected to know?
I mean, what's left? Are we all going to have to become genome researchers or some other elaborate uber-career that takes over half a decade to train for?
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