Dec. 14, 2003 - 20:47 MST

THE WONDERING JEW

Interesting

What comes afta NAFTA ? Jobs shipped overseas from Mexico 'cause labor is cheaper there, thats what happens.

Quoting from an article by Mark Stevenson of the Associated Press - "NAFTA legacy mixed for Mexico, workers."

"Ten years ago Anapra was a sea of shacks made of packing crates and car parts. Families stored scarce water in discarded industrial drums, and illegal electricity hookups started fires and electrocuted residents."

"The North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented Jan. 1, 1994, was supposed to change places like Anapra, bringing more jobs and higher wages and reducing the need for Mexicans to head north."

"The jobs came -- an estimated 500,000, mostly at foreign-run assembly plants known as maquildoras -- but they often left again for China or wherever wages were lower. And while NAFTA brought some progress to this sprawling slum, separated from El Paso by a chain-link fence, many see themselves stuck in no-exit, unstable jobs, and many outside the industrial hubs have been forced to leave their farms or emigrate to the United States."

"What the country gained was a sudden influx of subsistence-level industrial jobs that over time proved to be a poor counterweight to the lure of migration. Wages in the best paid export plants average about four times the minimum wage of nearly 44 pesos, the equivalent of $3.85 per day."

Many now say it was deceptive to tout NAFTA as a solution to long-standing problems like poverty and migration. U.S. government estimates of the number of undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States rose from 2 million in 1990 to 4.8 million in 2000."

Still, the jump in migration was largely due to strong demand for workers in the U.S. market -- not NAFTA.

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So shipping jobs from the US to Mexico - 500,000 of them apparently didn't slow the migration a damn bit and the illegals are working jobs and our unemployed citizens are out of work.

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then there is this article in our same paper of Dec. 14 by Jennifer Alsever Beauprez -- "Jobs exiled from U.S. give rise to activism."

"Richard Armstrong has a loud-mouth, and he couldn't be happier about it. A Denver computer programmer, Armstrong has been laid off three times and each time replaced by foreign workers. Outraged that U.S. companies move more jobs and then create them in such countries as India and China, Armstrong started organizing. Now 100,000 people are writing members of Congress, urging them to do something to stem the tide of exported jobs."

Ms. Beauprez goes on, "Unlike car manufacturing of the 1970s, the latest round of job exports is not just a blue-collar problem. These are white-collar jobs, and those educated and articulate workers know how to organize and tend to vote."

Further on comes a comment of something I am quite familiar with, because I have heard the same song all too often, "These are information jobs we were supposed to be keeping after manufacturing jobs went," said Candice Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Communications Workers of America. It causes people to wonder what jobs will be left."

I remember once telling a technical twidget that what was happening to us in the manufacturing field would sooner or later happen to his type."

"Corporate executives, meanwhile, fear the stumping by politicians will lead to knee-jerk protectionist legislation penalizing companies that use offshore workers. Such laws critics say, would interfere with global economics and could ultimately harm U.S. businesses' ability to compete globally." Other reasons are cited but seem to boil down that it will hurt the bottom line for our beloved corporations, you know.

There are a few things in the works, but who knows if any real thing will come of it ?

"Last month, presidential candidate U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass, introduced a bill that would require companies to inform people who phone offshore call centers about where the workers are located.

One provision of the proposed federal budget for 2004 would bar any existing federal work from going offshore.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has asked the CIA to study the national security implications of offshoring.

Two studies are underway at the General Accounting Office to study the implication of offshore work on U.S. employment.

Eleven states are reviewing legislation that either mimics Kerry's federal Consumer Right to Know bill or bans companies from state contracts if they use offshore work.

Now comes the squeaking wheel, "Business executives, however, argue they can't compete, let alone keep their companies alive, if they hire U.S. workers to staff call centers and develop software when their competitors hire foreigners at a fraction of the cost." The article has a graph showing the number of jobs going overseas from 0.1 million in 2000 to 0.6 million in 2005, projected on a constant rise to 3.3 million in 2015

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Seems to me that companies and corporations have been shipping work out of country ever since I began reading newspapers -- one way or another. Companies have offshore banking, safety deposit accounts and many other devious practices. I remember the last place I worked where the upper echelon used scare tactics citing global competition and opened some education classes so that the factory help could fit themselves for the higher paying jobs if we qualified. Now those jobs are gone too.

My personal opinion is that companies and corporations have not kept their infrastructure up to date, have not made enough effort to make their plants state of the art and I feel that this is what they were planning all along. Along with that is union demands that were pretty ridiculous, being met by the biggies to keep things running smooth for the nonce. There have been abuses on both sides, but the big money has always had the hammer. As a nation we have grave problems which seem to be getting worse as time goes on and at the rate we are going there will be nobody alive or well enough in our fair country to even work jobs.

Another time that I rant and rave and don't have the vaguest idea of how to solve the problem -- but I will say that somebody or bodies better do something intelligent to benefit us common blue-collar and white-collar joes !

So what is next I wonder ? Will something good happen ? Interesting . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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