Your job may be next! Millions of U.S. jobs, as well as thousands of independent businesses, face extinction under policies that favor importing cheap labor and exporting production

New American, The, March 10, 2003 by William F. Jasper

The mood in the conference room was light and festive. It was just two weeks before Christmas 2002 and many of the 300 or so Dell employees were getting set for the holidays and year-end vacation time as they gathered at Dell's campus in Austin, Texas, for a "town hall" meeting. They were ill prepared for the message that senior vice president Jeff Clarke was about to deliver. Meetings of this sort were usually big on awards, recognition, and introductions of new products and project teams. And despite the market drubbing of tech stocks in general, Dell had posted another banner year in sales, growth, and profits. The company also benefitted from a nice cash balance, Mr. Clarke noted. Then came the bad news. The company was announcing new personnel "attrition goals" of 10 percent per year, about double the normal attrition rate. These positions would not be filled in the United States, Clarke explained. They would be filled by new hires in India, China, and other countries where Dell is shifting business.

Audible gasps came from the employee audience, a hi-tech assemblage of Dell software engineers, electrical engineers, test engineers, group managers, and administrative talent. A Dell employee who attended the meeting told THE NEW AMERICAN: "A definite pall came over the crowd. It did not make for a happy Christmas."

Although Clarke's announcement came as a shock, there had been hints of an impending axe-fall. In 2000, Dell had announced the launching of its China Design Centre in the People's Republic of China (PRC). A steady trickle of Red Chinese engineers, project planners, and managers had been brought to Dell's Austin campus for training, and some U.S. Dell employees had made the trek to China for four-to-six-month stints to train Chinese personnel there. Around the Dell headquarters in Austin, employees had begun wryly referring to the "Chinese invasion" as "training our replacements." Few expected that the replacing would start so soon.

Invasion-Migration Pincer

Dell's sparkling new China Design Centre in Shanghai joins similar research and design centers in China, Russia, and India built by Microsoft, Motorola, Boeing, General Electric, and other corporate titans. The hi-tech centers are a distinctly new development, in contrast to the huge number of foreign manufacturing plants--especially in Mexico and China--built by U.S. companies over the past couple of decades. These early rounds of "globalization" cost millions of U.S. jobs, but various experts assured us that this should not concern us because these were blue collar "rust belt" jobs. Old technology, they claimed. Manufacturing is passe, they said. The U.S. would enter the new global economy with the new technology. Information, services, cutting-edge research and development--these would be the clean, high-paying jobs that would keep America on top.

But guess what? After years of stripmining America's industrial base, U.S. corporate elitists and their political allies in Washington, D.C., Beijing, Mexico, Moscow, and elsewhere are now looking to dispense with upscale white collar jobs as well. College grads who obtained degrees in computer science and engineering are finding themselves replaced by Third World counterparts willing to work for 20-50 percent less pay. In corporate globalese this replacement process is euphemistically called "outsourcing." Adding insult to injury, many of the replacement foreign workers received tax-subsidized educations in U.S. universities.

According to Business Week:

In a recent PowerPoint presentation, Microsoft Corp. Senior Vice-President Brian Valentine--the No. 2 exec in the company's Windows unit--urged managers to "pick something to move offshore today." In India, said the briefing, you can get "quality work at 50% to 60% of the cost. That's two heads for the price of one."

The same issue of Business Week offered this glib forecast:

Now, all kinds of knowledge work can be done almost anywhere. "You will see an explosion of work going overseas," says Forrester Research Inc. analyst John C. McCarthy. He goes so far as to predict at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will shift from the U.S. to low-cost countries by 2015.

This is a massive shift that bespeaks far more than the number of jobs and the billions of dollars on the bottom line. It concerns the critical competitive edge that U.S. has enjoyed due to our innovation and technological leadership. That competitive edge is disappearing. It is being given away--to our competitors and even to our avowed enemies. The Business Week quotes above came from the magazine's extraordinary February 3rd cover story, which ran under the alarming heading, "Is Your Job Next?" This was followed by a long cover subtitle: "The next round of globalization is sending upscale jobs offshore. They include basic research, chip design, engineering--even financial analysis. Can America lose these jobs and still prosper?"

The very obvious answer to Business Week's question is a resounding no! These hi-tech jobs are not luxuries that we can allow to be nonchalantly discarded. They are critically important, as are many of the low-tech jobs exported to foreign lands in recent years. Manufacturing does matter. It is essential to a strong national economy, especially for a world power like the United States with sizeable defense imperatives. We will have little hope of prosperity if we allow our nation to depend on competitors or outright adversaries for basic parts, supplies, technologies, and resources. America needs a solid base of the "old," "dirty" industries of mining, metallurgy, oil, coal, timber, steel, agriculture, and manufacturing, not only for prosperity, but for survival. All of our hi-tech advantages on the virtual battlefield will quickly prove a hollow reed if we do not have the means to produce arms, munitions, equipment, transportation, food, and clothing for our forces on the real battlefield.