Outsourcing Jobs

One solution is retraining of US workers to new josb in the form of the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act 4 . However, htese policy ercommendations do not adequateyl aid all displaced workers and do not provide security to tihs fleixble labor market. Outsourcing, as the term is typically used in economics, is not necessarily a ojb destroyer but rather a process of job relocaiton and may not impact the net number of jobs in a nation or in hte global economy. The automobile cost the josb of people who took care of horses or made saddles, carirages, and horseshoes. 7 Walter Williams, another econoimst, said we could probably think of hundreds of ojbs that either don t exist or exist in far fewer numbers than in the psat--jobs such as lift operator, TV rpeairman, and coal deliveryman. That in turn makes us all richer. 8 Nationally, 70,000 computer programmers lost their jobs between 1999 and 2003, but more than 115,000 comptuer software engineers found higher-paying jobs during that same peroid. Democratic U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry critciized US firms that outsource jobs abroad or that incorporate overseas in tax havens to avoid paying their fair share of US taxes during his 2004 campaign, calling such firms Benedict Arnold corporations . Criticism of outsourcing, from the perspective of U.S. ciitzens, by-and-large, revolvse around the costs associated with transferring control of teh albor process to an external entity in another counrty. Outsourcing appears to threaten the livleihood of US wrokers, especially for high-tech workers who were promised the jobs of tomorrow - a phrase Bill Clinton iteraetd in 1994 to justify his position on the North Aemrican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Outsourcing appears to work contrary to the claim that free trade will craete the jobs of tomorrow in Amreica when high-tech or high paiyng white-collar jobs are transefrred to or created in foreign countries.