Outsourcing Pt. 2

Okay. Now that we have the talk about the Oscars out of the way, we can move back to the outsourcing of jobs. I must be perfectly frank when I tell you that manufacturing jobs are just not going to come back. The damage is already done. It just costs too much to pay a US worker and if you want to maintain quality, you drive costs even higher. This will continue until there are no poor countries desperate for low wage jobs in the world. That's not happening anytime soon. One of the hotbutton issues right now is that China is deliberately undervaluing its currency to keep its exports high and its imports low, undercutting the market. People cry foul but this is an agressive form of Capitalism. The Chinese play hardball. They will let their currency up at some point, but only until they have between 90-100% market share. Then they can dictate whatever price they want. You might be able to worm the Chinese out, but only if you used the same tactics and were prepared to put up some nasty shortages of stuff that the Chinese already have a lock on. I don't see that happening.

White collar job loss can be slowed, but its going to take a major disaster to do it. Management doesn't care about safety until it reaches up and bites them (see Sioux City airport crash). They care about costs. If they can continue to farm out the work to Poland or India, where the workers have lots of PhDs but no experience, then there is very little that can be done to stop them. It won't be until you get an airline engine that was fully designed by Indians explode due to shody design, that you'll see any backlash.

There have been some attempts to legislate the jobs to stay in the US, but legislatures are reluctant to put them in place because of the backlash from the companies. Instead of keeping jobs, the company will just pull out entirely from that state and relocate elsewhere. There will still be a demand for their product and they can just ship it in via other channels.

In the long term, the US must move towards becoming a service economy. Jobs that depend only on either a rising or a stable population, which we have. We are a nation of mass consumers and service sector jobs are the only ones that aren't going away anytime soon. Some people won't like it becuase the jobs out there are the ones being done by illegal aliens or Hispanic immigrants who ship most of their money back to their country of origin. But that's the only solution I can see at the moment.