4 good articles

Date: Thursday, July 17, 2008 2:12 AM

<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1890 -- 7/16/2008 >>>>>

The following four articles are worth reading because they are factual and
well written. It's unfortunate that none of them are published in the
mainstream media.

Article 1:
http://counterpunch.org/roberts07102008.html
A Workforce Betrayed
by Paul Craig Roberts

Article 2:
http://www.rightsidenews.com/200807011314/editorial/american-innovation-supremacy-at-risk.html
American Innovation Supremacy at Risk
by Phyllis Schlafly

Article 3:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/realitycheck/archives/2008/06/h1b_visas_do_no.html
H-1B visas do not create new jobs
By Ephraim Schwartz

Article 4:
http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=1147
Immigration-Trade Link Can No Longer Be Ignored
by Alan Tonelson

Article 5:
http://newswire.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20080613.081516&time=08%2040%20PDT&year=2008&public=0
Outsourcing Jobs Leaves the American White-Collar Worker Behind; A Revised
and Updated 'Outsourcing America' Calls for Action
by Susan Gawlowicz

1. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://counterpunch.org/roberts07102008.html

July 10, 2008

A Workforce Betrayed
Watching Greed Murder the Economy
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The collapse of world socialism, the rise of the high speed Internet, a
bought-and-paid-for US government, and a million dollar cap on executive
pay that is not performance related are permitting greedy and disloyal
corporate executives, Wall Street, and large retailers to dismantle the
ladders of upward mobility that made America an "opportunity society." In
the 21st century the US economy has been able to create net new jobs only
in nontradable domestic services, such as waitresses, bartenders,
government workers, hospital orderlies, and retail clerks. (Nontradable
services are "hands on" services that cannot be sold as exports, such as
haircuts, waiting a table, fixing a drink.)

Corporations can boost their bottom lines, shareholder returns, and
executive performance bonuses by arbitraging labor across national
boundaries. High value- added jobs in manufacturing and in tradable
services can be relocated from developed countries to developing countries
where wages and salaries are much lower. In the United States, the high
value-added jobs that remain are increasingly filled by lower paid
foreigners brought in on work visas.

When manufacturing jobs began leaving the US, no-think economists gave
their assurances that this was a good thing. Grimy jobs that required
little education would be replaced with new high tech service jobs
requiring university degrees. The American work force would be elevated.
The US would do the innovating, design, engineering, financing and
marketing, and poor countries such as China would manufacture the goods
that Americans invented. High-tech services were touted as the new source
of value-added that would keep the American economy preeminent in the
world.

The assurances that economists gave made no sense. If it pays corporations
to ship out high value-added manufacturing jobs, it pays them to ship out
high value-added service jobs. And that is exactly what US corporations
have done.

Automobile magazine (August 2008) reports that last March Chrysler closed
its Pacifica Advance Product Design Center in Southern California.
Pacifica s demise followed closings and downsizings of Southern
California design studios by Italdesign, ASC, Porsche, Nissan, and Volvo.
Only three of GM s eleven design studios remain in the US.

According to Eric Noble, president of The Car Lab, an automotive
consultancy, "Advanced studios want to be where the new frontier is. So in
China, studios are popping up like rabbits."

The idea is nonsensical that the US can remain the font of research,
innovation, design, and engineering while the country ceases to make
things. Research and product development invariably follow manufacturing.
Now even business schools that were cheerleaders for offshoring of US jobs
are beginning to wise up. In a recent report, "Next Generation Offshoring:
The Globalization of Innovation," Duke University s Fuqua School of
Business finds that product development is moving to China to support the
manufacturing operations that have located there.

The study, reported in Manufacturing & Technology News, acknowledges that
"labor arbitrage strategies continue to be key drivers of offshoring," a
conclusion that I reached a number of years ago. Moreover, the study
concludes, jobs offshoring is no longer mainly associated with locating IT
services and call centers in low wage countries. Jobs offshoring has
reached maturity, "and now the growth is centered around product and
process innovation."

According to the Fuqua School of Business report, in just one year, from
2005 to 2006, offshoring of product development jobs increased from an
already significant base by 40 to 50 percent. Over the next one and
one-half to three years, "growth in offshoring of product development
projects is forecast to increase by 65 percent for R&D and by more than 80
percent for engineering services and product design-projects."

More than half of US companies are now engaged in jobs offshoring, and the
practice is no longer confined to large corporations. Small companies have
discovered that "offshoring of innovation projects can significantly
leverage limited investment dollars."

It turns out that product development, which was to be America s
replacement for manufacturing jobs, is the second largest business function
that is offshored.

According to the report, the offshoring of finance, accounting, and human
resource jobs is increasing at a 35 percent annual rate. The study observes
that "the high growth rates for the offshoring of core functions of value
creation is a remarkable development."

In brief, the United States is losing its economy. However, a business
school cannot go so far as to admit that, because its financing is
dependent on outside sources that engage in offshoring. Instead, the study
claims, absurdly, that the massive movement of jobs abroad that the study
reports are causing no job loss in the US: "Contrary to various claims,
fears about loss of high-skill jobs in engineering and science are
unfounded." The study then contradicts this claim by reporting that as more
scientists and engineers are hired abroad, "fewer jobs are being eliminated
onshore." Since 2005, the study reports, there has been a 48 percent drop
in the onshore jobs losses caused by offshore projects.

One wonders at the competence of the Fuqua School of Business. If a 40-50
percent increase in offshored product development jobs, a 65 percent
increase in offshored R&D jobs, and a more than 80 percent increase in
offshored engineering services and product design-projects jobs do not
constitute US job loss, what does?

Academia s lack of independent financing means that its researchers can
only tell the facts by denying them.

The study adds more cover for corporate America s rear end by repeating
the false assertion that US firms are moving jobs offshore because of a
shortage of scientists and engineers in America. A correct statement would
be that the offshoring of science, engineering and professional service
jobs is causing fewer American students to pursue these occupations, which
formerly comprised broad ladders of upward mobility. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics nonfarm payroll jobs statistics show no sign of job growth in
these careers. The best that can be surmised is that there are replacement
jobs as people retire.

The offshoring of the US economy is destroying the dollar s role as
reserve currency, a role that is the source of American power and
influence. The US trade deficit resulting from offshored US goods and
services is too massive to be sustainable. Already the once all-mighty
dollar has lost enormous purchasing power against oil, gold, and other
currencies. In the 21st century, the American people have been placed on a
path that can only end in a substantial reduction in US living standards
for every American except the corporate elite, who earn tens of millions of
dollars in bonuses by excluding Americans from the production of the goods
and services that they consume.

What can be done? The US economy has been seriously undermined by
offshoring. The damage might not be reparable. Possibly, the American
market and living standards could be rescued by tariffs that offset the
lower labor and compliance costs abroad.

Another alternative, suggested by Ralph Gomory, would be to tax US
corporations on the basis of the percentage of their value added that
occurs in the US. The greater the value added to a company s product in
America, the lower the tax rate on the profits.

These sensible suggestions will be demonized by ideological "free market"
economists and opposed by the offshoring corporations, whose swollen
profits allow them to hire "free market" economists as shills and to elect
representatives to serve their interests.

The current recession with its layoffs will mask the continuing
deterioration in employment and career outlooks for American university
graduates. The highly skilled US work force is being gradually transformed
into the domestic service workforce characteristic of third world
economies.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal
editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor
of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at:
paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

2 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.rightsidenews.com/200807011314/editorial/american-innovation-supremacy-at-risk.html

American Innovation Supremacy at Risk
July 1, 2008

by Phyllis Schlafly
Eagle Forum

The high-priced corporate lobbyists walking Capitol Hill corridors have a
new mantra: innovation. They demand that Congress bring in more guest
workers, especially from Asia, in order to maintain American innovation
supremacy.
The lobbyists' backup buzzword is "the best and the brightest." They argue
that U.S. workers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics are
in short supply and we must now import foreign engineers and scientists,
i.e., allow the multinationals to bring in an increased or even unlimited
number of H-1B visas.

Their argument lacks evidence: Economics 101 teaches that shortages in
labor or goods produce higher wages or higher prices. In fact, we have no
shortage of engineers or computer techies, so their wages are stagnant and
are certainly not going up.

In 2005, we graduated 271,000 students with bachelors or master's degrees
in science and engineering who were citizens or legal residents. The dean
of Duke University Engineering School says that 40 percent of his graduates
do not get engineering jobs.

Bill Gates and other multinationals simply prefer to hire Asians,
particularly from India, who work for low wages and can be trained on the
job.

Professor Norman Matloff examined the H-1B record and discovered that H-1B
visa recipients are mostly employees of ordinary talent doing ordinary
work. Most of them work at Levels I and II, described by the Department of
Labor in terms akin to apprenticeship, while very few H-1B workers are at
Level IV, the level of expertise whose description is associated with
innovation.

"Aliens of extraordinary ability" and outstanding professors and
researchers can come into our country in another category, EB-1, and we
welcome them. Another argument used by the lobbyists is that international
comparisons of math and science K-12 test scores show that Americans are
weak. That cannot be used as evidence because India and China refuse to
participate in those tests.

Professor Matloff dispels the myth that our tech industry owes its success
to math geniuses coming from Asia. The evidence does not support this
"Asian mystique."

The Department of Homeland Security is doing its part to help the
multinationals hire foreign graduates of U.S. universities instead of
Americans by increasing the time foreign students can join the U.S. labor
pool without an H-1B visa from 12 months to 29 months.

On a Friday afternoon, DHS quietly announced a new regulation that
figuratively staples an H-1B visa to the diploma of all foreign graduates
in science, technology, engineering or math. This bureaucratic edict really
increases the H-1B cap by 23,000, which is the number of foreign students
getting degrees in science, math and engineering this year.

Foreigners can remain in the United States for up to six years on an H-1B
visa. That's plenty of time to have an anchor baby and stay forever, and
there is no accounting of those who leave when their visa time is up.

The H-1B program was originally set up to help U.S. companies by allowing
them to bring in specially qualified foreigners to fill jobs for which no
American can be found. But six of the top 10 H-1B visa recipients in 2007
are based in India, and two others headquartered in the U.S. have most of
their operations in India.

This year's keynote session of the American Institute of Mining,
Metallurgical, & Petroleum Engineers revealed how U.S. supremacy in
technology is under attack in even more devious ways. A panel of speakers
described the future role of U.S. engineers in the 21st century.

One speaker proclaimed that "pure engineering tasks" will all be
outsourced, that our engineers must realize they are "citizens of the
world," and that we must abandon "the engineer of the past, with a slide
rule hanging from his belt," and change into a "personable manager with an
engineering background" who will create personal relations with "external"
clients.

A second speaker predicted that "engineering jobs will develop overseas and
stay there since the technical resources will be there and the
infrastructure will follow." A third speaker said that an engineer must "be
prepared to jump from one place to another" because it's "risky for
engineers to be focused on a very narrow aspect of any specific job."

A fourth speaker said that our challenge is "not so much the technical
engineering but the socio-political engineering." A fifth speaker said,
"the quality and quantity of R&D going overseas is increasing faster than
it is here in the United States."

We wonder if there is any longer a purpose in American students taking the
scholarly road of engineering school. To paraphrase a once-popular TV ad,
"where's the innovation?"

3. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://weblog.infoworld.com/realitycheck/archives/2008/06/h1b_visas_do_no.html

H-1B visas do not create new jobs

By Ephraim Schwartz

June 24, 2008

Back on Oct. 25, 2005, I published excerpts from a study by John Miano, a
member of the board of directors for the Programmers Guild, which refuted
claims, using the government's own labor and wage statistics, that those
working on an H-1B visa in high tech were receiving equivalent salaries to
U.S. citizens.

The point of the column was to shed light on emerging evidence that
companies might in fact be using H-1B visas not as a way to fill in skills
gaps but as a way to hire cheap labor at the expense of both U.S. and
foreign national workers.

[ If your tech job has moved overseas, can you move with it? Find out in
InfoWorld's special report. ]

Miano has now published a new study with the Center for Immigration
Studies. This one, titled "H-1B Visa Numbers: No Relationship to Economic
Need," refutes the claims made by some that the granting of H-1Bs creates
more job opportunities for everyone in high tech.

Everyone from Bill Gates to prestigious business publications such as The
Wall Street Journal and The Economist has claimed that for every H-1B visa
granted, between three and five new jobs are created.

Gates stated his claim in testimony before Congress this year: "Microsoft
has found that for every H-1B hire we make, we add on average four
additional employees to support them in various capacities."

To support its claim, the Journal cited a study by the National Foundation
for American Policy called "H-1B Visas and Job Creation." According to the
study's regression analysis of H-1B filings and employment at U.S. tech
companies, the Journal said, "the data show that for every H-1B position
requested, U.S. technology companies increased employment by 5 workers."

Miano blows those claims apart with simple arithmetic.

Using public data, Miano says that if the H-1B program is creating five
jobs for each visa, then logically with 100,000 H-1B visas issued last
year, there should have been at least 500,000 new high-tech jobs.
Obviously, this was not the case. Actually, approximately 63,000 jobs were
created during 2005. Miano's figures are from the U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services, which announced 116,927 H-1B visas for 2005 and
130,497 for 2004.

"I only use the number of new visas, not renewals and transfers in my
studies," Miano tells me. Miano goes on to point out that not only are
H-1Bs not creating new jobs, but in fact, "the U.S. is approving H-1B visas
for computer workers at a rate to fill at least 70 percent of the computer
jobs created."

Another interesting stat from the study is the fact that on average there
are about 49,000 new H-1B visas approved for computer workers under the
current law. (The rest of the 65,000 visas issued annually go to people
working in other technology areas.) So at an annual U.S. growth rate of
63,000 new computer jobs per year, the number of H-1Bs will be enough to
fill 78 percent of the growth.

Finally, Miano looks at engineering jobs and finds that the discrepancy
between available jobs and visas issued is even worse.

"Every year since 2001, the number of H-1B visas approved for engineers has
been greater than the number of engineering jobs created." Since 1999,
there has been a net loss of 76,000 engineering jobs, while during the same
period the United States has approved on average 16,000 new H-1B visas each
year for engineers.

The key finding is that there is actually no cause-and-effect relationship
between H-1B visas and job creation. So, first companies claim there is a
labor shortage and that's why they need H-1Bs. Now, the strategy is to
claim that not only do they need H-1Bs, but somehow the visa class creates
more jobs than it takes away.

Who are they kidding?

Let's call it as it is. The first Miano study put the lie to the fact that
workers on an H-1B visa are making equivalent salaries to U.S. workers.
Now, the second study by Miano puts the lie to the claim that new jobs are
created because of the H-1B program.

Cheap labor is what this is all about. There would be no rush to bring in
workers on an H-1B visa if a company wasn't saving money. End of story.

4. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=1147

Immigration-Trade Link Can No Longer Be Ignored

By Alan Tonelson
Monday, July 05, 2004

Unemployment rates for high-tech workers are still above the national
average. Pay in these fields has gone nowhere for 20 years. As a result,
national anxiety about job flight overseas has hit levels not seen since
the 1980s.

Yet Congress is considering a bill to make it easier for high-tech
companies to bring cheap foreign workers into the United States. Worse,
this bill is being sponsored by a Congressman -- Texas Republican Lamar
Smith -- who s been an immigration control advocate for years. What in
blazes is going on here?

Very simply, we re starting to pay the price for failing to recognize
that our immigration and outsourcing problems are closely connected. By
treating these policies in isolation, even many champions of urgently
needed immigration reduction policies have painted themselves into corners
and left themselves -- and Americans as a whole -- few good choices.

The case for creating and maintaining high-tech jobs and industries in the
United States can t be made often enough. These jobs are critical for our
nation s future prosperity, not to mention national security. High-tech
industries pay excellent wages, contribute mightily to U.S. innovation and
productivity, and help ensure our global technology leadership. And of
course, high-tech jobs are the jobs our leaders have told us to re-train
and re-educate ourselves for in the wake of mounting competition for
so-called old-line manufacturing jobs from third world countries.

For more than a decade, however, these high-tech jobs and industries have
been turned into much lower paying jobs and industries by two developments:
First, greatly loosened immigration laws and second, NAFTA-style trade
deals whose purpose is really to encourage U.S. multinational companies to
supply U.S. markets from low-cost third world countries.

Throughout the 1990s boom, these looser trade and immigration policies
gained powerful momentum, as the bubble economy undercut worker opposition,
and multinationals literally bought Congress and the Executive Branch with
lavish campaign contributions.

Yet critics of these policies sabotaged themselves, too. Trade policy
critics tended to ignore immigration issues. Indeed, organized labor in
America has recently completed an historic transformation and become a
powerful pro-immigration force. Meanwhile, immigration policy critics, like
Rep. Smith, tended to ignore trade issues. With the critics divided and
incoherent, the outsourcers and globalizers did a pretty good job of
conquering. As a result, the globalization cheerleaders were able to create
powerful new economic realities on the ground that threw the critics on the
defensive and narrowed their room for maneuver.

Rep. Smith s latest bill, which would permit high-tech companies to
import 20,000 more H-1B specialized foreign workers, is a great example.
Rep. Smith portrays his legislation as a compromise that has fended off
even greater quota increases. And he claims it will ultimately help
American workers by reducing many abuses associated with these immigration
programs -- like the common practice of paying immigrants much lower wages
than comparable domestic workers earn.

But the Smith bill is simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at
the last minute. Ten years of NAFTA-like outsourcing-focused trade deals
have opened the low-wage road to success for American companies and turned
this strategy into the way business is done in industry after industry.
With so many firms routinely supplying the U.S. market from abroad, their
counterparts that have remained at home have felt that much more pressure
to cut costs. Hiring cheap immigrants understandably is one very appealing
option. In addition, the flight of manufacturing production abroad has
encouraged the flight of much high-tech service work associated with
manufacturing -- research, development, design, engineering. Hence, the
cost-cutting heat has been rising in career fields once thought immune.

Immigrants numbers, as a result, are growing so fast that the
government s enforcement capabilities are swamped. The abundance of this
labor, in turn, has lowered the wages of domestic high-tech workers even
though the regulations are supposed to prevent this. Indeed, a reverse
Catch-22 situation has been created. Employers are simply obligated to pay
H-1B immigrants prevailing wages. Yet Washington s failure to enforce
this requirement has naturally driven the prevailing wages in high-tech
industry ever lower.

Surging immigrant flows have also discouraged many young Americans from
pursuing high tech schooling and careers. Consequently, continuing credence
is lent to claims of high tech labor shortages and more pressure mounts for
even looser immigration policies to meet the alleged needs. In other words,
the free-immigration interests Rep. Smith forestalled this time will be
back again and again.

If Rep. Smith and his colleagues in Washington are serious about bringing
U.S. immigration under control and genuinely helping U.S. workers,
they ll realize that a comprehensive strategy is needed. The very idea
that multinational companies can pay Chinese or Indian or Mexican wages for
the creation of their products, yet charge American prices for the sales,
has to be challenged frontally as a dangerous economic fantasy that is
sinking our nation deeper and deeper into foreign debt. The need to
maintain America s world technology leadership by developing new
innovative capabilities at home and keeping them here has to be championed.
And if genuine labor shortages do emerge in high tech industries -- as they
do from time to time in every industry -- U.S. companies have to be told to
attract workers the old-fashioned way -- by raising wages or developing new
labor-saving technologies.

The latter, by the way, historically has been a great engine of progress --
as research from the respected Center for Immigration Studies has made
clear. But with the crutch of low-wage labor available, many American
companies have lacked the requisite kick in the pants.

Rep. Smith and others view his 20,000 H-1B quota increase as American
workers best hope to get back into the high-tech game. But he and
others concerned about immigration need to understand that this isn t
policy and it isn t tactical brilliance. It s nothing more than
defeatism.

Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry
Educational Foundation and the author of The Race to the Bottom: Why a
Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American
Living Standards (Westview Press).

5. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://newswire.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/behold.pl?ascribeid=20080613.081516&time=08%2040%20PDT&year=2008&public=0

Fri Jun 13 08:40:19 2008 Pacific Time

Outsourcing Jobs Leaves the American White-Collar Worker Behind; A

Revised and Updated 'Outsourcing America' Calls for Action

ROCHESTER, N.Y., June 13 (AScribe Newswire) -- Outsourcing might be

good for American corporations, but it's not necessarily good for American
workers, and it's likely to be bad for the American economy, even in the
long run.

The revised edition of "Outsourcing America: The True Cost of

Shipping Jobs Overseas and What Can Be Done about It" (AMACOM) written by
Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of
Technology, and Anil Hira, professor of political science at Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver, brings attention to the voiceless white-collar
American worker.

Moving jobs overseas is reshaping the American economy to suit

corporate America. It also compromises American workers, the authors
maintain. The trend has increased significantly since "Outsourcing America"
was first published in 2005 and now includes different skill levels and
types of jobs, says Ron Hira.

Released this spring, "Outsourcing America" updates the outsourcing

debate and critically assesses the role corporations play in setting policy
for high-skill immigration and outsourcing, the practice of moving American
jobs across national borders. The authors also look at outsourcing trends
in Europe, Canada and Australia, and other developed countries.

"Outsourcing America" closely examines the message businesses send

when they threaten to outsource more jobs if not allowed to import cheaper
guest workers.

"What they're saying is that increasing the guest worker program

(H-1B and L-1 visa programs) will keep jobs here and save jobs from being
offshored," says RIT's Hira. "When in reality those programs are being used
to do knowledge transfer to transfer jobs overseas. The business community
is on the one hand saying outsourcing is good, and on the other using the
threat of outsourcing to change immigration policy. It's quite clever."

Instead of American companies competing against foreign rivals -

which was the case in the 1980s when American semiconductor, auto and steel
manufacturers lost market share to Japanese manufacturers - companies are
now pitting their American workers against their overseas counterparts.
According to Hira, this changes the political dynamics, but more
importantly, changes which policies will be effective.

The white-collar worker has no representation in the outsourcing

debate controlled by business interests, he notes. Likewise, the U.S.
government has taken no policy response to outsourcing, an issue that has
surfaced in the 2008 election season.

"The presidential candidates have tried to use the issue of

outsourcing to their advantage, but once you cut through the rhetoric,
there isn't much substance behind the policy proposals from either
candidate," Hira says.

The authors recommend establishing a new organizational institution

that represents American workers, something akin to the influential AARP,
but on issues that directly affect the workplace.

"We don't have an organization for people who work," Hira says.

"There's almost no awareness even that people aren't represented in
Washington. And I don't see anybody talking about it."

ABOUT RIT

Rochester Institute of Technology is internationally recognized for

academic leadership in computing, engineering, imaging technology, and fine
and applied arts, in addition to unparalleled support services for students
with hearing loss. Nearly 16,000 full- and part-time students are enrolled
in more than 200 career-oriented and professional programs at RIT, and its
cooperative education program is one of the oldest and largest in the
nation.

For nearly two decades, U.S. News & World Report has ranked RIT

among the nation's leading comprehensive universities. The Princeton Review
features RIT in its 2007 Best 361 Colleges rankings and named the
university one of America's "Most Wired Campuses." RIT is also featured in
Barron's Best Buys in Education.

CONTACT: Susan Gawlowicz, RIT News Service, 585-475-5061,

smguns@rit.edu

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