How Many U.S. Companies are Outsourcing Jobs?
Outsourcing jobs is a hotly debated issue these days. The elitists think nothing of it and feel it’s only fair that they should be able to turn as big a profit as possible at all costs – even if it’s at the cost of the American economy and America’s jobs. Roughly a year ago a Washington Post/ABC News poll released its findings that 44 percent of Americans thought the economy was getting worse rather than staying the same or getting better, and opinions have only gone down hill since then. With unemployment then hovering around 9.6 percent, many Americans felt then as if the economy was leaving them behind. And it was.
The current trend evokes images of bumper stickers back in the late ‘80s with the American flag emblazoned on them asking the questions and giving the reply: Hungry? Out of work? Eat your foreign car! This, of course, referred to the beginning of the Asian Invasion, as many called it, with foreign automakers from Japan flooding the market with the popular fuel-efficient automobiles that also came with attractive price tags. Many of those same Americans — most of which were auto industry workers — sporting those stickers are now smugly saying, “I told you so,” much to everyone’s dismay.
It wasn’t that U.S. automakers had shipped all their jobs overseas back then but that the imports were hurting their sales, thus diminishing demand and in essence putting workers here in this country out of a job. The distinction is there between imports and outsourcing jobs overseas, but the end result is the same: less work = less money in American’s pockets = less money to spend on products and services here in this country.
And this is where it gets confusing for most of us. If you close up your factories over here to go abroad to turn a greater profit and leave your former employees without jobs and enough businesses follow suit, where are we as citizens supposed to come up with the money to buy your products and afford your services? Did none of these big businesses ever think this far in advance? Come on, people. It’s not rocket science. We’re broke and our economy is in a shambles, but who can be surprised.
These companies built their businesses on the sweat of hard-working Americans and reaped the benefits of their labor and then got greedy and decided to close up shop and flee like a thief in the night to what they considered greener pastures where they could enlist sweat-shop labor that would work for pennies a day, and they’d still like us to support them financially through our patronage and by picking up the slack on their tax breaks that we all absorb down here in Lilliput where all us little people reside.
So what happened? Free trade was supposed to be such a good thing. Well, to a certain extent it is but, like everything in life, only in moderation. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Corporate America certainly wasn’t doing its part to help bring America out of its economic malaise. The paper stated it surveyed employment data by some of the nation’s largest corporations such as General Electric, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, Stanley Works, Merck, United Technologies and Oracle, among others, and found that they cut their workforces by 2.9 million people over the last decade while hiring 2.4 million people overseas!
Though there are no exact figures on just how many jobs have been lost due to this turning of the tide, the paper went on to make mention of the fact that this is actually a sharp reversal from trends in the late 1990s when these very same companies were creating more jobs in the United States than overseas. It’s also troublesome to note that in 2001, when our country was in full meltdown what with the horrors of 9/11 that had unfolded, these corporations began adding more jobs abroad than at home. How’s that for patriotism? We build you up and make you who you are and bring you profits and wealth and then it’s heave ho and farewell. We see how you are…
Sources:
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/04/19/159555/us-corporations-outsourced-americans/
admin @ July 26, 2012