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Message |
    
Michael Janay
Citizen
Username: Childprotect
Post Number: 173
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 8:34 am: |     |
Brett,
The WSJ put it best yesterday...
Its not Republicans versus Democrats on this issue, its Economists and those who understand economics versus everyone else. |
Duncan
Citizen
Username: Duncanrogers
Post Number: 1537
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 9:43 am: | |
quote:its Economists and those who understand economics versus everyone else.
Yea.. because Lord knows there is only one way to look at econimic data. That is almost to simplistic to acknowledge.
Oh, and we are surely going to add 2.6 million jobs to the economy this year.
Noah?? I want you to build an Ark..
RIIIIIGGGGHHHTTTT
whats an ark
Alls Well That Ends Well. Playing through March 7. info at http://www.hometown.aol.com/theatr1010/ |
court07040
Citizen
Username: Court07040
Post Number: 45
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 9:58 am: | |
Amen, Brett! Most employees in the private sector are "workers at will." We can leave our jobs at any time for any reason (i.e., more $$, greater responsibility, oppty for advancement, etc). That being the case, we can't have it both ways. The freedom to work "at will" costs us the security of lifetime employment at one company. For me, this is a fair tradeoff. |
Montagnard
Citizen
Username: Montagnard
Post Number: 433
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 10:46 am: | |
You can't have a very responsible job if you think you can walk away from it "at will". |
court07040
Citizen
Username: Court07040
Post Number: 46
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 11:16 am: | |
that's a bullshit comment |
themp
Citizen
Username: Themp
Post Number: 519
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 11:33 am: | |
Not having a job, whether it is a consequence of the natural law of economics, heartless capitalist cruelty, or healthy and inevitable outsourcing, has certain practical drawbacks. That's why people vote. Voters aren't pure theorists; they are practical. |
Montagnard
Citizen
Username: Montagnard
Post Number: 434
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 3:44 pm: | |
Your services won't be required any further, Mr. Court07040. These gentlemen from Security will escort you off the premises.
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Cynicalgirl
Citizen
Username: Cynicalgirl
Post Number: 421
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 3:58 pm: | |
"The 50 year olds are the ones that get hurt the hardest, plus there looking at a lot less money to retire on due to the problems with the stock market over the past few years."
This is an issue, for those of us who are about to be 50! And it's real. Fortunately, for me and my 53 year old husband, some firms have learned the hard way that (1) not all people over 50 require big salaries, (2) most people over 50 have a great work ethic, and (3) those of us who have survived in IT this long, through various gigs etc., are pretty flexible.
Needless to say, we work at firms that value us. We are not doddering, expensive, or anything like it. We've both sought training -- I an MBA in my 30's -- and kept up. But it isn't easy... |
Michael Janay
Citizen
Username: Childprotect
Post Number: 174
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 4:11 pm: | |
Duncan,
This isn't about economic data, its about economic theory.
And for the most part, economists, be they GOP or DEM agree that open trade, be it in goods or services, is a good thing.
Outsourcing is just another form of trade.
In the long run, it is a very good thing. |
court07040
Citizen
Username: Court07040
Post Number: 47
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 9:33 pm: | |
Hey Montagnard - It just so happens that i went to lunch with two of my superiors today and subtley mentioned that I needed my salary increased by 25%. They subtley replied that it wasn't in the cards this year. So you know what I did on the way home? I worked out a deal to join one of my competitors at double the salary i'm currently making. Only in America, baby!! |
Montagnard
Citizen
Username: Montagnard
Post Number: 435
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - 11:11 pm: | |
It sounds like you were either undervalued or underutilized by your original employer. You sure didn't sound happy, anyway.
I wish you every success in your new position. |
bobk
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 4707
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 7:56 am: | |
A question to the defenders of total free trade if I may? Where are decent jobs going to be produced? Almost all business functions can be outsourced from manufacturing, customer care, accounting, IT, etc.
Most larger companies are now international in scope. I don't think they view themselves as American anymore. Many are moving their domiciles offshore to avoid taxes. Should these companies be viewed as "American" even though they were founded here? |
Brett
Citizen
Username: Bmalibashksa
Post Number: 733
Registered: 7-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 8:27 am: | |
Our company still has many viable positions here in the states. Salesmen, Project Managers, Human Resource, Installers, Instructors, System Administrators. All of these jobs were created because we need to manage and support the off shore employees. These are well paying jobs that are much more satisfying then sitting at a desk all day pounding out code. They’re also jobs that would not be available if we had to fill the office with programmers. Many of our employees are former programmers that were displaced and “Moved Up” the career ladder. I don’t think that we’re losing as many jobs as the news is leading us to believe it’s not 1 for 1. |
Duncan
Citizen
Username: Duncanrogers
Post Number: 1545
Registered: 12-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 8:57 am: | |
quote:I don’t think that we’re losing as many jobs as the news is leading us to believe it’s not 1 for 1
nor are we creating as many as the administration is leading us to believe
Alls Well That Ends Well. Playing through March 7. info at http://www.hometown.aol.com/theatr1010/ |
Brett
Citizen
Username: Bmalibashksa
Post Number: 734
Registered: 7-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 9:01 am: | |
That's not the point. No where on this thread did anyone claim that this was going to create billions of jobs. |
Michael Janay
Citizen
Username: Childprotect
Post Number: 175
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 12:08 pm: | |
Regarding IT... we joke about it with our IT guy here. He always says that if someone can invent a screwdriver that reaches from India to NY, he'll gladly give up his job.
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bobk
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 4710
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 12:24 pm: | |
Michael, maybe not for hardware installation, yet, but for software issues, "No Problem" as my old bud Alf use to say. 
When I have PC problems the IT guy or gal takes over my computer from a remote location and fixes it. It is very wierd to watch your screen and cursor while this is happening. At this point the IT people are a floor away, but doing the work from India is just a step away.
Interesting article in the WSJ this morning. Drug trials and testing is also moving to India at a cost savings of 50% to 60%.
Look I ain't John Edwards by any means, but who is going to buy the products if nobody makes more than $15 an hour other than an increasingly shrinking elite?
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cjc
Citizen
Username: Cjc
Post Number: 950
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 12:39 pm: | |
George Will today. Some excerpts:
"So the economy suffered when automobiles caused the disappearance of the jobs of most blacksmiths, buggy makers, operators of livery stables, etc.? The economy did not seem to be suffering in 1999, when 33 million jobs were wiped out -- by an economic dynamism that created 35.7 million jobs. How many of the 4,500 U.S jobs that IBM is planning to create this year will be made possible by sending 3,000 jobs overseas?"
"For the highly competent work force of this wealthy nation, the loss of jobs is not a zero-sum game, it is a trading up in social rewards. When the presidential candidates were recently in South Carolina, histrionically lamenting the loss of textile jobs, they surely noticed the huge BMW presence. It is the ``offshoring" of German jobs because Germany's irrational labor laws, among other things, give America a comparative advantage. Such economic calculation explains the manufacture of Mercedeses in Alabama, Hondas in Ohio, Toyotas in California.
As long as the American jobs going offshore were blue-collar jobs, the political issue did not attain the heat it has now that white-collar job losses frighten a more articulate, assertive social class."
For where these new decent paying jobs come from, I can't give you the answer because some entrepreneur or scientist or inventor hasn't invented the business for it yet. But it will happen, and has. And if my job is gone, I plan on doing what people have always done -- hustle. I was told that this would be the case as I grew up, a lesson imparted to me by my parents and Depression Era grandparents.
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bobk
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 4712
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 1:52 pm: | |
At least the buggy manufactureres didn't move off shore while getting huge tax breaks from the government. |
Montagnard
Citizen
Username: Montagnard
Post Number: 436
Registered: 6-2003
| | Posted on Thursday, February 19, 2004 - 8:47 pm: | |
Of course, as more and more of America's weapons are manufactured overseas, you can expect a decline in American military power. It will be interesting to see how the rightists attempt to deal with this. |
wharfrat
Citizen
Username: Wharfrat
Post Number: 980
Registered: 6-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 20, 2004 - 5:39 am: | |
An alternative point of view to George Will's column-
February 20, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dark Side of Free Trade
By BOB HERBERT
The classic story of the American economy is a saga about an ever-expanding middle class that systematically absorbs the responsible, hard-working families from the lower economic groups. It's about the young people of each successive generation doing better than their parents' generation. The plotline is supposed to be a proud model for the rest of the world.
One of the reasons there is so much unease among voters this year is the fact that this story no longer rings so true. Books based on its plotline are increasingly being placed in the stacks labeled "fantasy."
The middle class is in trouble. Globalization and outsourcing are hot topics in this election season because so many middle-class Americans, instead of having the luxury of looking ahead to a brighter future for the next generation, are worried about slipping into a lower economic segment themselves.
This is happening in the middle of an economic expansion, which should tell us that the terrain has changed. In terms of job creation, it's the weakest expansion on record. The multinationals and the stock market are doing just fine. But American workers are caught in a cruel squeeze between corporations bent on extracting every last ounce of productivity from their U.S. employees and a vast new globalized work force that is eager and well able to do the jobs of American workers at a fraction of the pay.
The sense of anxiety is growing and has crossed party lines. "We are losing the information-age jobs that were supposed to take the place of all the offshored manufacturing and industrial jobs," said John Pardon, an information technology worker from Dayton, Ohio. Mr. Pardon described himself as a moderate conservative, a longtime Republican voter who has become "alienated from the Republican Party and the Bush administration" over the jobs issue.
Mr. Pardon does not buy the rhetoric of the free-trade crusaders, who declare, as a matter of faith, that the wholesale shipment of jobs overseas is good for Americans who have to work for a living.
"There aren't any new middle-class `postindustrial' or information-age jobs for displaced information-age workers," he told me. "There are no opportunities to `move up the food chain' or `leverage our experience' into higher value-added jobs."
The simple truth, as Mr. Pardon and so many others have found through hard experience, is that enormous numbers of well-educated, highly skilled white-collar workers are having tremendous trouble finding the kind of high-level employment they've been trained for and the kind of pay they feel they deserve.
The knee-jerk advocates of unrestrained trade always insist that it will result in new, more sophisticated and ever more highly paid employment in the U.S. We can ship all these nasty jobs (like computer programming) overseas so Americans can concentrate on the more important, more creative tasks. That great day is always just over the horizon. And those great jobs are never described in detail.
These advocates are sounding more and more like the hapless Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield," who could never be swayed from his good-natured belief that something would "turn up."
We've allowed the multinationals to run wild and never cared enough to step in when the people losing their jobs, or getting their wages and benefits squeezed, were of the lower-paid variety. Now the middle class is being targeted, and the panic is setting in.
No one really knows what to do — not the president, not John Kerry or John Edwards, and most of all not the economists and other advocates who have been so certain about the benefits for American working men and women of unrestrained trade and globalization.
What happens when the combination of corporate indifference and the globalized pressure on jobs and wages becomes so intense it weakens the very foundations of the American standard of living?
The fact that this critically important issue is finally becoming an important part of the national conversation is, to borrow a phrase used in another context by the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, "a good thing."
Perhaps an honest search for solutions will follow.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
bobk
Supporter
Username: Bobk
Post Number: 4722
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 20, 2004 - 7:55 am: | |
Anyone else catch Lou Dobbs last night? Normally I view his economic views as main stream Republican (think O'Neil or even Bush I)and he is certainly among the most amiable of men.
Last night he really got going and unloaded on a California Congressman about exporting Americas wealth with a lot of comments on the half trillion dollar trade deficiet, at a time where the dollar is weak no less, and the half trillion budget deficiet which just about everyone feels is a very optomistic number.
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Dr. Winston O'Boogie
Citizen
Username: Casey
Post Number: 542
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 20, 2004 - 9:11 am: | |
What does George Will have to worry about? What are the chances that his newpaper and TV gigs will be outsourced to a similarly pompous gasbag in China? |
argon_smythe
Citizen
Username: Argon_smythe
Post Number: 114
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Friday, February 20, 2004 - 5:26 pm: | |
Whoa I gotta back up there a minute.... "employment at will" is the employee's benefit? Yeah... and the company's HR department is there to advocate for the workers too!!! 
Believe me, you could leave your job long before "employment at will" was devised. People have been leaving their jobs ever since there was such a thing as a job to leave.
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Michael Janay
Citizen
Username: Childprotect
Post Number: 176
Registered: 1-2003
| | Posted on Friday, February 20, 2004 - 5:58 pm: | |
Don't kid yourself Argon... indentured servitude, company store credit scams, Contracts where all payment was forfeited if the employee left before the end of the term.
That is what started the entire "at will" movement.
Executives sign non-compete contracts all the time. If they leave they can't work in their field for years. It can be horrible for all sides when one side wants out of the contract for whatever reason. Believe me, I've seen it on both sides.
"at will" is best for both sides. |
tom
Citizen
Username: Tom
Post Number: 2044
Registered: 5-2001
| | Posted on Monday, February 23, 2004 - 3:54 pm: | |
oops, he did it again. Now this same guy is saying, ""When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a 'service' or is it combining inputs to 'manufacture' a product? ... Sometimes, seemingly subtle differences can determine whether an industry is classified as manufacturing. For example, mixing water and concentrate to produce soft drinks is classified as manufacturing. However, if that activity is performed at a snack bar, it is considered a service."
McJobs, anyone?
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