Last week, the Lunatic-in-Chief extolled the virtues of outsourcing while in India. There's no disputing that outsourcing has been a boon to India, but the reality that Bush doesn't want to deal with is that it has wrought havoc here in the U.S.
No professional or technical job is safe from outsourcing. We already know that IT has been decimated by outsourcing. But accounting, back office financial processing, and clinical trials data management are among the other fields being exported.
And to that, Bush has no good answers, other than "get an education."
Well, I have an education. I have a master's degree in Management Information Systems, and have had technology training courses every year for the last five years. But I am a 50-year-old web developer, and I know that if I should lose my job to layoffs, my career in IT is over. And this AFTER I got the education for the 21st century job. Why? Part of it is that if a job has 25 skills requirements in its ads, having 24 of them isn't enough. They want all 25, and if they can't get all 25, they'll hire three H-1Bs instead. Another part of it is that the Web is still seen as a young person's game, and I quite simply am not young. That I'm relatively well-versed in "youth culture" for a 50-year-old doesn't matter. When you're older than the boss' dad, you aren't going to get hired.
The opportunities for young people aren't much better. Entry-level jobs are being advertised that require 2-5 years of experience.
So where are Americans going to work? And who's going to shop at Wal-Mart when they have NO income at all?
Krugman deals with this today:
Here's what Mr. Bush said in India, when someone raised the question of the political backlash against outsourcing: "Losing jobs is painful, so let's make sure people are educated so they can find — fill the jobs of the 21st century. And let's make sure that there's pro-growth economic policies in place. What does that mean? That means low taxes; it means less regulation; it means fewer lawsuits; it means wise energy policy."
O.K., so you're a 50-year-old worker whose job has just been outsourced, and Mr. Bush tells you that you should go get a 21st-century education and rejoice in the joys of a lawsuit-free economy. Uh-huh.
Actually, Mr. Bush's remarks were even more off-key than they seem, coming during a visit to India. India's surge into world markets hasn't followed the pattern set by other developing nations, which started their export drive in low-tech industries like clothing. Instead, India has moved directly into industries that advanced countries like the United States thought were their exclusive turf. When Business Week put together a list of areas "where India has made an impact ... and where it's going next," that list consisted almost entirely of high-technology activities like software and chip design.
What this means is that American workers whose jobs are threatened by Indian competition are, in many cases, people who thought they already had acquired the skills to "fill the jobs of the 21st century" — but have just discovered that Indians, who are paid about a tenth as much, also have those skills.
Am I saying that we should try to stop outsourcing? No. But if you don't feel conflicted about the effects of globalization, if you don't worry about the many losers from the process, you aren't paying attention. And American workers deserve a better answer to their concerns than yet another assertion that a rising tide raises all boats, because that's manifestly untrue.
The fact is that we're living in a time when most Americans are seeing little if any benefit from overall income growth, because their share of the economic pie is falling. Between 1979 and 2003, according to a recent research paper published by the I.R.S., the share of overall income received by the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers fell from 50 percent to barely over 40 percent. The main winners from this upward redistribution of income were a tiny, wealthy elite: more than half the income share lost by the bottom 80 percent was gained by just one-fourth of 1 percent of the population, people with incomes of at least $750,000 in 2003.
And those fortunate few are the only people Mr. Bush seems to care about. Look at what he had to offer after asserting, in effect, that workers get outsourced because they don't have the right education: lower taxes, deregulation and fewer lawsuits. Funny, that doesn't sound like "pro-growth" policy to me. Instead, it sounds like a wish list for wealthy individuals and big corporations.
If your job is secure right now, good for you. Maybe you won't have to deal with it. But if your field falls to outsourcing, and you should find yourself laid off and over 40, you too will find that this Administration doesn't give a shit about people like you.
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