Thanks to trade deals, automation, and inexcusable policies like tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas, the United States has lost 6 million good-paying jobs since 2000. For those laid-off workers, the Trade Adjustment Assistance program (TAA) exists to provide resources for training, relocation, and other services needed during a job transition.
Now, the Working for America Institute has set up a new, user-friendly website to help workers apply for the TAA program. TAAHelps.org gives clear direction on when and how applications must be filed, even providing a printable checklist for needed tasks and video testimonials of successful applicants.
Winkie Brown was laid off from an assembly line at Johnson Controls in Ohio in 2009. In a web video on TAAHelps.org, she says, “As far as the chance and the opportunity to go back to school – if it weren’t for TAA I wouldn’t have been able to afford it…so that’s the blessed part of this.” Another Ohioan featured on the site, Jeannine Pummill, used TAA resources to become a certified Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) after 31 years in manufacturing.
While we’re glad these new resources are available for transitioning workers, we’re still keeping the pressure on Congress and the President to make good on their talk of keeping jobs in the United States. First, we’re keeping everyone up to date on the off-shoring practiced by companies in their area by maintaining and updating our Job Tracker tool. Second, our 9 Demands for the 99 Percent petition, signed by over 26,000 people and counting, demands that corporations “stop sitting on their profits and start hiring again in America.”
Luckily, it seems like they are starting to listen. Rep. Tim Bishop (R-NY) introduced a bill earlier this year to crack down on overseas outsourcing in call centers; President Obama made manufacturing, clean energy jobs, and “insourcing” key parts of last week’s State of the Union speech, proposing tax incentives for companies that bring jobs back from abroad. The Administration has also proposed a “manufacturing communities tax credit” to encourage businesses to move into areas where there has been a mass layoff.
Tags: Jobs, layoffs, manufacturing, outsourcing
Outsourcing: if it’s one thing Working America members hate, it’s when companies ship jobs overseas so they can pay their workers less.
That’s why we’re cheering Rep. Tim Bishop (D-NY) and his new bill H.R. 3596, The United States Call Center Worker and Consumer Protection Act. Not only does the bill keep taxpayer-funded loans and grants from going to companies who outsource call center jobs, it would also require those companies to report their outsourcing in advance to the Department of Labor.
While we love incentives for companies to act more responsibly and hire workers here at home, but it’s the reporting requirement that caught our eye. Job Tracker, our online resource to track corporate local corporate abuses, relies on Department of Labor data sets to help inform users of outsourcing, mass firings, and a variety of other labor law violations. This bill would help us help you, the American consumer, support companies that follow the law and treat workers well.
But you don’t think corporate-backed interest groups and their allies in Congress are going to take this lying down, do you? Huffington Post quoted one official saying a “strong lobby team” should be sent to DC to stop the bill’s progress.
In response, Rep. Bishop, a Democrat, has enlisted two Republican Congressmen as co-sponsors: Dave McKinley (R-WV) and Michael Grimm (R-NY). The Communications Workers of America (CWA), which represents over 150,000 call center employees, called the bill “an actual, honest-to-God, bipartisan bill focused on U.S. jobs.”
CWA backed up their support of the bill with a report that details the damage done to the U.S. economy by call center outsourcing: “Why Shipping Call Center Jobs Overseas Hurts Us Back Home.” The idea that has entered popular culture is that U.S. consumers are routed to a call center in India – but the report exposes how many Indian firms have begun to “sub-outsource” calls to countries with even cheaper labor costs, such as the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The report also talks about companies that took local and state “job creation” incentives but shipped the jobs overseas anyway, essentially billing the taxpayer for the destruction of their own livelihoods.
Remember, this bill doesn’t fine call center companies for shipping jobs to other countries. It just says that your taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be directed toward those companies in the form of guaranteed loans or federal grants. It also would require call center companies to be open about their off-shoring, and have employees disclose their location and give the option of being transferred to a U.S. based employee if requested.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s small. But we urge you to watch your representatives, and see where they come down on this issue. What do they value more – the creation of American jobs? Or perhaps the support of multinational corporations who fill their campaign coffers?
Three cheers to Bishop, Grimm, and McKinley on this particular issue (we’re not fans of Grimm and McKinley’s stalling on jobs, rights at work, and healthcare) and let’s hope their colleagues take the same path. For more information about outsourcing in your area, check out Job Tracker.
Tags: Jobs, outsourcing
about the de-industrialization of the United States. From Business Insider:
It was America that showed the world how to mass produce everything from automobiles to televisions to airplanes. It was the great American manufacturing base that crushed Germany and Japan in World War II. But now we are witnessing the deindustrialization of America. Tens of thousands of factories have left the United States in the past decade alone. Millions upon millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost in the same time period. The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little. Do you know what our biggest export is today?
Waste paper.
The slide show (available at the link) is interesting and depressing. Even more depressing is their slideshow 19 iconic products that America doesn’t make anymore.
We don’t even make our own national league baseballs. It seems US companies would even outsource Mom’s Apple Pie. It’s difficult to imagine what kind of economic recovery we can expect if we don’t make anything here.
(Neofeudalism doesn’t count as recovery.)
Tags: outsourcing
From kansascity.com:
Hawker Beechcraft distributed 60-day layoff notices to 350 salaried employees Friday and confirmed a timeline by which it will eliminate about 800 union jobs.
Beechcraft is eliminating union jobs, but the work will get done elsewhere:
Boisture said that the 820 Machinists union layoffs, announced last week, will be completed by August 2011 and the work will be transferred to plants in Mexico and third-party suppliers.
Meanwhile, at Xerox:
Xerox Corp., the printer and business-services provider, raised its 2011 profit forecast and said it plans additional cost cuts, including the elimination of 2,500 jobs.
Per-share profit next year, excluding some costs, will be $1.05 to $1.10, compared with the previous projection of at most $1.05, Norwalk, Connecticut-based Xerox said today in a statement. Analysts had estimated $1.08 on average.
Cutting jobs to increase profits – a familiar story.
Profit this year, excluding some costs, will be 92 cents per share to 93 cents, the company said, compared with analysts’ average estimate of 92 cents. Xerox’s adjusted per-share profit excludes items such as restructuring and acquisition costs.
In order to increase profits by roughly 10 cents per share, 2500 people will lose their jobs.
Tags: Jobs, outsourcing, unemployment
Workers at a BMW plant in South Carolina make $15 an hour. That’s about half what German BMW workers make.
The trade debate in the United States usually focuses on the jobs lost to factories in the developing world. But the recession has forced countless skilled workers in this country to consider jobs they would have rejected in the past. They now offer foreign manufacturers a resource that was far less common just a few years ago: cheaper wages for better talent.
“We are a low-wage country compared to Germany,” said Kristin Dziczek, director of the Labor and Industry Group at the Center for Automotive Research. “And that helps put jobs here.”
But the price of having a more globally competitive workforce means more in the United States could fall well short of the middle-class living standards that manufacturing workers once could expect. Wages adjusted for inflation have declined for these workers since 2003.
This is what concerted class warfare waged on working people by corporations and the wealthiest brings us to. Now the US is a place where, even as good jobs are still leaving our shores, other countries come to find cheap labor—and our economy is such that, as the article details, “a former manager of a major distribution center for Target; a consultant who oversaw construction projects in four Western states; a supervisor at a plastics recycling firm” are all just hoping to get these $15 an hour jobs.
Tags: Jobs, outsourcing
Here’s a rare spot of good news. A Bloomington, Indiana GE plant once slated for closure will now be the site of investment in energy-efficient refrigerators:
The factory, which employs 585 members of Local 2249, will hire 200 more workers, part of a $93 million facility upgrade to add a new line of side-by-side refrigerators that will incorporate “green” insulation and other components.
Bloomington Local 2249 Business Manager Carven Thomas said the news elated members:
In 2008, we were on that obituary list. It was us. I hope this example will become a blueprint for company-labor relations and help reinvent manufacturing in the United States.
On Monday, GE shut down the plant temporarily to gather workers as well as local and state officials to share the news that instead of closing, selling, or spinning off the plant, the company was in fact making a major investment in the facility, adding the new line in Bloomington and bringing some jobs back to the United States from Mexico. IBEW International President Edwin D. Hill and Sixth District Vice President Lonnie Stephenson were in Bloomington for the announcement.
The Bloomington plant is among four that will benefit from the $432 million investment in “cool refrigeration” technology. The move will create 500 new green jobs by 2014 and brings GE’s total U.S. investment in appliance manufacturing announced since 2009 to more than $1 billion and jobs created to 1,300.
A company release says the factories will use a top-to-bottom redesign process that maximizes efficiency known as “lean” manufacturing. Most of the new units will be smart grid-enabled to save energy and cut costs. They’ll use refrigeration insulation that dramatically cuts greenhouse gas emissions. And the plants themselves will reduce carbon emissions 90 percent, GE says.
Of course this is just one of many, many similar steps GE and other corporations need to make, but it’s heartening nonetheless.
Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO blog covers a call for more investment in American jobs:
By rebuilding our nation’s transportation infrastructure, we could create 3.7 million jobs, 600,000 alone in manufacturing, according to a new action plan released today by the Apollo Alliance.
The Clean Transportation Manufacturing Action Plan (TMAP) calls for an investment of $40 billion a year over the next six years to modernize and shore up our nation’s roads, bridges, mass transportation and advanced vehicles. The plan was developed by a bipartisan group of union members, business owners, environmental and community activists and political leaders.
For decades, the United States has all but ignored mass transit. In fact, since 2005, U.S. companies and governments have spent more than $10 billion to purchase rail cars, tracks and other mass transit equipment overseas, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard said during a telephone press conference today. That $10 billion is money that should have been spent here.
Today, existing U.S. public transit bus, rail vehicle and clean truck supply chains support some 40,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs. There are more than 375 existing companies that could scale up to meet expanded demand if Congress is willing to put TMAP into action, Gerard says.
The potential is there. Now we need a government that will follow through with funding and incentives.
Tags: green jobs, Jobs, outsourcing
Yet another reason Job Tracker is an important tool:
Among the many lies told by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently, chief Chamber lobbyist Bruce Josten said that his organization’s foreign affiliates, called AmChams, are only “comprised of American companies doing business abroad in those countries.” In fact, the Chinese AmCham is comprised of Chinese firms like Northern Light Venture Capital; the AmCham in Russia is comprised of Russian state-run companies like VTB Bank; and, the AmCham of Abu Dhabi is comprised of UAE state-run oil companies.
The ties between the AmChams and the U.S. Chamber are deep. In addition to sharing staff members, the Chinese AmCham has worked closely with the U.S. Chamber and the Chinese government to sponsor a series of seminars in America to teach American businesses how to outsource jobs to China (called the China Grassroots Program).
Think Progress has a picture of an invitation to an event in Jacksonville, Florida to teach companies how to outsource to China. So far, the Job Tracker includes three companies that have exported jobs from the Jacksonville area, and 86 that have had mass layoffs.
Tags: Chamber of Commerce, outsourcing
Our Job Tracker has gotten a bunch of media coverage, and surprise, surprise—corporate types commenting about it don’t like it much.
In the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in response to the AFL-CIO database, countered with a blog post by its vice president of International Policy, John Murphy, who described as a “myth” the argument that creating a job overseas automatically eliminates one in the U.S. “It’s plain that some hope to turn concern about offshoring of jobs into votes,” he wrote.
It’s true. We care about votes and the Job Tracker is intended to sway voters. Like, first and foremost, the voters in the Senate who blocked the Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act the other week. We think it would be great if those elected officials would look at Job Tracker data and realize what a negative effect outsourcing was having on their constituents.
Tags: Chamber of Commerce, outsourcing
When we asked Working America members across the country how we could solve the jobs crisis, the most common policy they mentioned was preventing corporations from sending jobs overseas. Working people see jobs leaving their communities as corporations race to the bottom, moving jobs to foreign countries with low wages and lax workplace protections, driving wages and working conditions down for all of us. But while we see the plant closing or mass layoff in the next town over, it’s hard to know the scope of the problem-after all, corporations don’t want too bright a light shining on their unpopular actions, and the government doesn’t track every job lost to outsourcing.
That’s why Working America created the Job Tracker. Job Tracker is a publicly available, zip code-searchable database exposing companies that have been exporting jobs, laying off workers and violating safety and health laws and labor laws. Use it to search your area for companies that have sent jobs overseas, risked the safety and health of workers or violated their rights.
Job Tracker has a lot of information in it-more than 400,000 companies, in fact. But we know we didn’t catch everything. That’s why we’re asking you to search your area and see if any companies you know shipped jobs overseas are missing. If they are, tell us about it. We’ll research your submissions and add them to Job Tracker if we validate that outsourcing occurred.
Corporations aren’t going to stop moving jobs out of America unless we force them to stop, and we can’t change anything without good information about what they’re doing. Let’s take the first step by shining a light on outsourcing, safety and health violations and labor law violations.
Search on the Job Tracker for companies in your area that have sent jobs overseas, injured workers or violated their rights.
Tags: outsourcing
NPR:
For years, Americans have had their phone calls about credit card bills and broken cell phones handled by people in the Philippines or India. But American firms are starting to bring call centers back to the U.S. — and this time around, they are hiring more people to work in their own homes.
Ten years ago, it made a lot of sense to outsource these jobs overseas. But that’s changing. Increasingly, companies that want to outsource their customer service jobs are happy with these domestic arrangements.
High inflation and double-digit annual raises in some sectors are pushing up the cost of labor in India. At the same time wages in the U.S. are falling and companies are rethinking the trade-offs associated with outsourcing.
But:
Experts say outsourcing is still accelerating for jobs in IT services and manufacturing. Phil Fersht, an outsourcing analyst, says even before the recession started, companies were starting to realize that offshoring wasn’t the best option for other services.
In other words, the wage scale in the US has fallen so far that it’s cheaper to hire folks at home to do the lowest paying jobs. The better paying jobs, like IT and manufacturing, are still going overseas.
In fact, US labor is so cheap now, that outsourcing companies in India are outsourcing jobs to the US. From FT.com:
Pramod Bhasin, the chief executive of Genpact, said his company expected to treble its workforce in the US over the next two years, from about 1,500 employees now.
“We need to be very aware [of what’s available] as people [in the US] are open to working at home and working at lower salaries than they were used to,” said Mr Bhasin. “We can hire some seasoned executives with experience in the US for less money.”
I trust I don’t have to underscore the irony inherent in that last story.
Finally, if unemployed folks find jobs, those jobs are likely to be lower paying. From the New York Times:
For years, long before the recession began, job growth had become increasingly polarized in this country. High-paid occupations that require significant amounts of education and training grew rapidly alongside low-wage, service-type jobs that do not, according to David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The growth of these low-wage jobs began in the 1980s, accelerated in the 1990s and began to really take off in the 2000s. Losing out in the shuffle, Dr. Autor said, were jobs that he described as “middle-skill, middle-wage” — entry-level white-collar positions, like office and administrative support work, and certain blue-collar jobs, like assembly line workers and machine operators.
and
A new analysis by the National Employment Law Project, a liberal advocacy group, takes a different approach, identifying industries that have experienced job growth in 2010 and examining their median wages. It is a blunter measurement because it focuses on whole industries, within which there is often great diversity in income. Economists also cautioned that it was still too early to know exactly which sectors would eventually lead the way in a sustained recovery.
Nevertheless, the law project analysis offers a snapshot of where the employment growth has been so far. It found that job expansion to this point had been skewed toward industries with median wages that are low to middling, with a disproportionate share of job growth happening in industries whose median wages fell below $15 an hour.
Given that our entire economy revolves around consumer spending, it’s difficult to imagine how an abundance of low paying jobs will provide “recovery.” If this is the wave of the future, more foreclosures and bankruptcies await.
Tags: Jobs, outsourcing
