Forum Post: The “99% & Outsourcing”
Posted 13 years ago on Nov. 21, 2011, 3:27 p.m. EST by BenThare
(9)
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Optimistically I’ve spent time amongst you, finding most politically uniformed waiting for the alarm to signal the transition to anarchy. You started out as a ‘statement’: The 99% and Morphed into an acronym :OWS which is meaningless now and garners little if any positive media attention. Return to the emphasis on the 99% and target Outsourcing! This is the number one issue impacting the average “American” and their friends and families. Wall Street, Collective Bargaining, Foreclosures, National Debt, Trade and a Do Nothing Congress are all subcategories’ to the selling off of America under the title of “Outsourcing”. KISS’s: We need the 99% not a narrowing obsolete OWS crowd, with people like the dude on Spring St. trying to peddle me a custom stenciling on a selection of blank T-Shirt’s all made in CHINA? ……. “WE ARE THE 99%” ……….BACK-UP AND CARRY-ON.
I think automation is playing a bigger role in job losses than outsourcing. Most people don't pay attention to that issue since it's not in the media as much. Here's an interesting quote:
"Business Week estimates that 1% productivity improvement can eliminate up to 1.3 million jobs. With U.S. productivity growing at an annual rate of 3-5%, the reason for the jobs shortfall becomes clear. According to Forrester Research, of the 2.7 million jobs lost over the three years, only 300,000 have been from outsourcing.
Dick Morley explains it with his usual colorful flair, “Jobs are going down the silicon hole, not the outsourcing hole.” And the figures support this contention. Productivity resulting from industrial automation—not outsourcing—is the biggest culprit behind most manufacturing job losses. All industrialized countries are losing manufacturing jobs too – including China."
Here's a thread I made several days ago. If you can, check it out and look at the links I posted in my original post. http://occupywallst.org/forum/jobs-are-becoming-obsolete-due-to-advances-in-tech/
rbe, excuse me please for posting in spanish. Tanks.
He seguido con mucho interés sus opiniones y coincido en que la evolución de la automatización industrial es una de las razones principales de la desocupación (aunque no la única).
Sin embargo me permito observar que otra de las consecuencias de la automatización es la concentración de la producción en cada vez menos empresas, que necesitarán cada vez menos clientes, para productos cada vez más sofisticados. En mi opinión, una "fully automated society", sería sólo viable en un mundo habitado por no más de 500 millones de individuos. Honestamente creo que no será la tecnología la que vaya a resolver los problemas que su evolución a generado.
I'm trying to get better with my Spanish. I took it in college, but I used a translator for what you wrote.
I also think that automation will lead to fewer companies controlling the market. I don't think that this will be bad in the long run, as long as our system changes to a more controlled and regulated one. If you look at our society, it is very unorganized, and I think that a lot of consolidation would be good for us. In our current view, this would be considered 'monopolization', but that really only hurts us in an unregulated society. Efficiency should be the goal.
I do feel that our population is too high as well, but until a thorough survey is done for all of the resources of the world, I can't really put a number on what it should be. It seems that a lot of the developed countries are tackling this problem through social trends.
Your last sentence translated as "Honestly, I think it will be the technology that will solve the problems that led to its evolution." I'm not sure what you mean by that. Do you mean maybe a dark age is coming up due to a future war, or through the breeding out of smarter people?
Sorry again for my Spanish. Actually I wrote “Honestly, I think it will NOT be the technology that will solve…”
Rechazo el sólo pensar en eras de oscurantismo o en guerras futuras, pero más que en la tecnología mis esperanzas están puestas en el conocimiento y en la sabiduría. Pienso que aumentar la productividad (en tanto reducir empleos) no es un determinismo de la naturaleza humana sino del sistema económico actual. Eventualmente sí lo es (o debiera serlo) el mejorar la calidad de vida. Trato de imaginar entonces otro contexto cultural en el que la eficiencia sea medida por su potencial para lograr inserción social para cada vez más gente y no por la cantidad de horas de trabajo que ahorre.
Sé bien que lo anterior es demasiado simple. Podría extenderme pero no es éste el ámbito adecuado. También sé que una evolución hacia estos nuevos paradigmas encontraría fuerte oposición de los intereses económicos que se benefician de la actual “unregulated society” (as you said). Finalmente, la decisión de avanzar en un camino así será política y no tecnológica.
It's no problem! Google translate, for some reason, didn't translate the NOT. I agree. I think the current economic system will eventually have to change to take our technological advances into account. It's only a matter of time. It's WHEN not IF. I think the small % of people that are benefiting from the current system will eventually be under such intense pressure to change their beliefs, that they will have to conform to new ideas, though they will probably not change without a fight. If we could travel in time to the year 2100, we wouldn't even recognize the our society due to the advances we will have in quality of life.
What country are you in?
I'm from the city that forced the poetry of Borges, and Piazzolla's music. Best Regards.
Buenos Aires! Nice talking with you.
Accept your point, will follow your thread Thank You.....education always accepted.
No problem! Glad you checked it out. If you agree with the info, pass it along to others. Only way to get solutions is to first acknowledge the problem.
It'll happen just as soon as this country is ready to let go of the commerce clause (which grants congress absolute control over the economy).
Yes! This is what the 99% need to know and be brought to the streets to shout it out.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/abolish-commerce-clause/ :)
I now look in the paper for jobs and only see opportunities that don't cover my basic bills and won't ever cover my health care needs or the debts I owe from the loss of income I had before 2007...I'm not young enough and have more need for health care than I did when the same job opportunities that are available to me now where more feasible when I was 20 and my health was less of a concern. My grandfather didn't work 35 years at the same place after he left the Navy and set an example for my mother and myself for me to start at minimum wage w/o health care in my 40's because it's more important for the white collar guy to make an extra $billion in profits by sending jobs to china instead of keeping the jobs here for the blue collar middle class guy and only making several million in profits instead of a few billion.. it seems absurd that someone who can say that you can get by and fight to pay the bills by taking a shitty job would defend someone who takes jobs away from the working class to make unnecessary profits amounts. Profit is profit and when you're talking about the difference in profits that range in the millions to the billions by avoiding fair compensation to American employees by outsourcing and avoiding taxes and taking bailouts from the government that the rest of the tax payers (the blue collar guy - THE 99%) provided...HOW COULD YOU NOT STAND UP AND SAY, NO MORE TAX EVASION FOR THE 1%, NO MORE OUT SOURCING JOBS TO EVADE FAIR WAGES TO AMERICAN EMPLOYEES, NO MORE BAILOUTS WHEN YOU SCREW UP???
Scottp...your's is an excellent example of what the 99% should be protesting about, good thoughts for you.
This has been my main criticism even before the market crash in 2007, but has been amplified since I lost a great job I fought and clawed for 14 years in an industry I am damn good at.
We all can't be wall street moguls or Dr's and Engineers etc, right now the act of outsourcing is taking away the American Dream, ripping out the hardworking core of the American middle class and setting up a system where the entitled flourish and the less fortunate slave labor in dead end jobs and futureless careers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w
Outsourcing a significant part of the problem--over and above automation. If this were not the case why has the US shed manufacturing jobs faster than any of the other industrialized nations? Why did the rate of manufacturing decline accelerate sharply just when China received most favorable nation status?
What is needed now is not a detailed plan on how to solve this problem. Such plans could easily be constructed but they would never pass so there is not point. What is not needed is a political strategy that would elect the sort of politicians who would fix the problems. This too can never happen with the politics we have today.
Even changing the politics is premature, because politics is based on beliefs about how the world works which are deeply held and very difficult to change.
What is needed is for people's worldviews to change in ways that can accommodate a changed politics and all they would bring. And the way this happens is for compelling memes to be injected into popular discourse that will lead to clarification of individual worldviews. One such meme is the we are the 99% meme, which expresses the vastness of the divide between the very rich and the rest of us.
Another meme that is germane to this discussion would be a protective tariff. Such a tariff is hardly un-American, the first one was established by James Madison, father of the Constitution, in 1816.
It is easy to explain how a tariff helps US workers. Importers (buyers of foreign goods and services) would pay a sales tax that compensates for the taxes not being paid by those who produced the import. Buyers of domestic products would not pay this sales tax, since the producers have already paid US taxes. Such a tax would make domestic goods effectively cheaper relative to imports, encouraging production here.
It is easy to defend against critics.
To those who give Smoot-Hawley as an argument against a tariff, one can point out that the effect of a tariff would be to reduced the volume of trade. In 1930, the US ran a trade surplus, which adds to GDP. Reducing trade by a tariff in 1930 would reduce GDP, which is bad in a depressed economy. Today the US runs a trade deficit, which subtracts from GDP. Reducing trade by a tariff today would increase GDP, which is good for a depressed economy.
To those who counter with comparative advantage and David Ricardo, one can point out that Ricardo's proof assuming no movement of capital between countries which is obviously not the case today.
In actuality whether or not a tariff would help is a complicated question and one that does not need to be addressed at this time. Anything proposed by OWS (or anyone else) is not going to be enacted as originally formulated. What is needed it for the idea that trade policy is a big part of the problem and it needs to be changed. Injection of the idea for an across-the-board tariff provides a simply talking point that actually addresses the problem (jobs not being created here in America) in a much more direct and easy-to-understand fashion that does addressing public debt, which is the meme pushed by the Tea party in 2009 and 2010 (with considerable success I note).
It is only by getting ideas like this out there for consideration by ordinary people will the range of potential policy choices enlarge to encompass something that might work.
And example from the last time we were here can illustrate. FDR effectively addressed the crisis of the Depression using an executive order ending the gold standard signed in his first month of office (no involvement of Congress which would never had gone along). By doing this his party gained enormous political momentum, which translated in huge victories in the 1934 and 1936 elections, which eclipsed the GOP and helped the New Deal legislative program to be enacted. Now Hoover could have done the same thing with the stroke of his pen, gaining his own reelection and saving his party from 40 years in the wilderness.
But Hoover could never have done this because to many ending the gold standard was considered to be an invitation to disaster (just as many today believe that is the debt is not addresses it invited disaster). Many in FDR's party agreed with Hoover, but there was a large minority who thought it a good idea, These were the heirs of populist movements of the late 19th century (e.g. the Greenbackers and Free-Silver populists) whose movements had been subsumed into the Democratic party. Thus, by coming out against gold, FDR was following in a tradition with a good-sized public following, which make it a policy that was politically conceivable to him, as it was not for Hoover.
Right now both parties have Hoover's problem. None of the politically conceivable policy options will work. What us needed is for more policies to move into the public discourse so that new options that might help become politically conceivable.
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