|
Communist China, which specializes in slave labor. We abhor that, of course, but what can we do? If we don't send our jobs there, our competitors certainly will, and where will we be then?
Out of business, that's where.
The big downside to all this is that we're destroying customers. Every job lost in the United States is a customer lost. Every job lost is a taxpayer lost and a tax burden gained. The pioneers in the outsourcing movement thought they were smart, and perhaps they were. Their competitors did what they had to do to survive.
But where will it all end? Will it be good for America when all the industry is somewhere else?
Governments can influence what happens. Conservatives say they don't like big government, and liberals nod in agreement, but big government in India is what's moving a lot of our high-tech jobs there.
India, thanks to government sponsorship, has the best technical institutes in the world. They admit only the best of the best, about 2 percent of applicants. Their standards are higher than Ivy League standards. And they have no room for slackers.
The result? India's high-tech people are sought after by American businesses, and we're shipping high-tech jobs to India at a breathtaking pace.
Most of you are too young to remember this, but the phrase "Made in Japan" used to be another way to say "junk." Japan had a reputation of producing everything out of used American beer cans.
That all changed in 1959, when the Japanese government told its manufacturers that, henceforth, everything shipped from Japan had to be of high quality. Toyota and Sony and all the rest had no choice but to comply, and now "Made in Japan" means dependable quality.
In America, our efficiency might spell our doom. Not only are we outsourcing production to the lowest bidder, but we've done a pretty good job of dumbing down all the jobs so that any low-paid worker can perform them. And we've automated to a maddening degree, which becomes obvious when you call just about any company with the hope of talking to a real person.
(Getting rid of switchboard operators in favor of an annoying automated system seems rather dumb until you realize how much money can be saved by not employing a team of round-the-clock operators.)
And the Wal-Martization of America continues apace, with our choices of retailers, grocers, banks, gas stations -- just about everything -- getting smaller and smaller.
I don't know what we or our government can do to reverse the movement of the United States toward Third World status. In Washington, it's all about money. The Republicans have always been the party of big business and money, and now the Democrats have joined them. The corporations are wonderfully represented, the people much less so.
What to do? It's fairly easy to see what's happening, but extremely difficult to know what to do about it.
Published on Monday, January 12, 2004 by the SF Gate
|
|
