Job Relocation is ‘Trade’ in BushWorld

By Roger Bybee

George W. Bush has a story on the outsourcing of US jobs, and he’s sticking to it. Outsourcing to low-wage, high-repression wages has long been a major source of anxiety for blue-collar workers and their communities. But with this trend tearing through the office cubicles of highly-educated, high-tech workers in the midst of a “jobless recovery,” it has escalated into the most explosive domestic political issue for 2004.

Outsourcing ties together several strands that agitate Americans. It coalesces growing resentment over some two million lost jobs, stagnating wages and the visible polarization of wealth, a wave of major Enron-style corporate scandals, and Corporate America’s abandonment of loyalty to workers, communities and the US through the shifting of jobs and tax liabilities.

But in the midst of this, Bush has doggedly kept to a script of promoting investor-rights globalization based on the North American Free Trade Agreement model. No doubt Bush and his spokesmen were emboldened by the unexpectedly high reports of 308,000 new jobs reported for March, although manufacturing dropped for its 44th consecutive month. Nonetheless, Bush argues that free trade will soon produce prosperity for working families, along with, of course, the multinational corporations already profiting so handsomely.

After a bit of backtracking in the wake of chief economic advisor Gregory Mankiew’s clumsy depiction of outsourcing as “a good thing,” Bush and other key spokesmen are now back on the aggressive in promoting corporate-style globalization.

There has been no departure from asserting that investor-rights globalization is good for America and American workers. Bush’s only concessions to public anxiety over jobs have been a largely meaningless re-training program, discussed below, and awkwardly-delivered “I feel your pain” statements. (“This is called a period of transition. That’s an economist’s word for things aren’t going too well for you. And I understand that. I understand people are worried about the job they have.”)

Meanwhile, Bush and the Republicans in Congress have staunchly resisted an extension of unemployment compensation for about one million workers whose benefits have expired. Bush’s Labor Department has similarly resisted the granting of Trade Readjustment benefits to high-tech workers whose jobs were moved offshore to China or India.

Along with the unwillingness to provide even traditional gestures of relief to displaced workers, the Bush team’s pro-outsourcing offensive has also been fraught with clumsy public-relations missteps and laughably implausible claims. Bush’s Economic Report of the President praises outsourcing and ponders re-classifying fast-food employees as manufacturing workers. The long-awaited appointment of a manufacturing “czar” exploded when it was revealed that Anthony Raimondo, an Omaha CEO, had himself laid off 30 to 75 workers at Behlen Mfg. while building a new plant in low-wage China. The Bush administration was forced to quickly hit the ejector button for Raimondo.

To account for “outsourcing” without casting any public blame on CEOs, Bush and Treasury Secretary John Snow have repeatedly advanced the imaginative thesis that “frivolous lawsuits” are driving US jobs overseas. Bush stated, “Tort reform will help make it easier to keep jobs here at home.” In fact, this theory is so creative that you can look at the annual report of the US Council on Competitiveness or dozens of articles in business publications without finding a single reference mentioning the civil justice system as a factor in “outsourcing” or overall US “competitiveness.”

But untroubled by such inconvenient facts, Bush & Co. have been continuing to press ahead relentlessly with their free-trade agenda. For example, Treasury Secretary John Snow told the Cincinnati Enquirer March 30, “It’s [outsourcing] part of trade. It’s one aspect of trade, and there can’t be any doubt that trade makes the economy stronger.”

Within this imaginary free-trade universe, those who criticize outsourcing are caricatured as opponents of all trade. Thus Bush recently stated, “When you hear people talk about, let us reconsider free-trade agreements, what they’re really saying is, is that perhaps we ought to wall ourself off from the rest of the world. See, I think that would be absolutely wrong for America to be so pessimistic about our ability to compete that we become economic isolationists.”

The assertion that critics of globalization seek an end to all trade is, of course, ridiculous. As economist Michael Zweig puts, “Trade is not the problem. The problem is trade without standards to block the effects of greed.”

Equally absurd is Bush’s notion that fair-trade advocates fear the inability of US workers to compete with foreign firms. The reality: most of what masquerades as “trade” by US corporations does not involve competition but actually consists of transactions within the firms.

Some 60% of global “trade” by US firms involves “intra-firm” transfers. Thus, US-based GE “exports” parts and components to MexicoUS. The stunning gaps in pay between the USMexico (typically 60 cents to $1 an hour) or China (30 cents or less per hour) makes those low-wage havens magnets for US jobs. where they are assembled and thereby converted into “imports” coming back into the and nations like

Over the past decade, the US has lost about 2.5 million factory jobs, according to Global Trade Watch’s Lori Wallach. Of these, about 879,000 went to Mexico since NAFTA’s implementation, an Economic Policy Institute study states. Some 300,000 to 600,000 US jobs are moving offshore annually, Business Week estimated March 1.

In trumpeting the benefits of free trade despite its impact on working families, Bush is doggedly following the agenda of his major donors who plan to accelerate the pace of their outsourcing of US jobs. As reported in the Daily Mis-Lead (www.misleader.org) March 10, Bush has raked in over $440,000 and his party hauled in than $3.6 million from corporate interests like American Express, GE, Ford, Hewlett Packard and other leading outsourcers.

However, the gathering outflow of jobs now being planned by US CEOs is so intense that Bush may become the focus of resulting public outrage. “Most US companies plan to outsource more of its (sic) back-office functions overseas where labor is cheaper, despite a public relations backlash and weaker prospects for cost savings, according to a survey of 182 companies” conducted by DiamondCluster International, Reuters reported March 26. Such an outflow is likely to inflame the grievances of US workers, with an unhappy potential for Bush’s reelection chances.

Still, Bush thinks he has a winning formula: “Exports equal jobs,” as he told a Wisconsin audience March 29. However, Bush’s equation on sales of US corporations’ products abroad and job creation here has been radically altered already by the export of jobs by US-based corporations. More than two-thirds of what US corporations sell overseas actually originates from their plants located overseas. As the New York Times’ Louis Uchitelle reported March 19, US-based corporations’ “overseas sales, which have risen to more than $2.2 trillion annually in recent years, dwarf the nation’s exports of roughly $1 trillion.” While the output of overseas US plants has nearly tripled in the past 15 years, exports from US factories have grown much more slowly.

The only substantive sign that Bush truly recognizes the job shortage is his proposal announced April 5 for doubling federal spending on retraining. This is truly a case of election-year “foxhole religion,” as Bush has compiled a shameful history of cutting such spending. But Bush now feels an urgent need to genuflect in the direction of dislocated workers’ needs.

Yet given the fact that a substantial number of the newly-displaced workers are already equipped with college degrees and experience in high-tech jobs, retraining is a rather meaningless consolation prize.

For workers facing a future reshaped by outsourcing, training programs are a bit like receiving swimming lessons and then an invitation to plunge head-first into an empty swimming pool.

Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based writer and activist.

---