Outsourcing American Jobs

By John Ballard

Phil Mattera at Dirt Diggers Digest (love that name) reports on Job Tracker database and interactive map.

Tracking Corporate Traitors

Not too many years ago, America was up in arms about offshore outsourcing. The news media were filled with reports of the wholesale migration of both white collar and industrial jobs to low-wage havens in Asia. The mood of panic was reflected in articles such as the March 2004 Time magazine cover story Is Your Job Going Abroad?

For most people these days, the outsourcing controversy has largely been forgotten or recalled only in the context of the new NBC sitcom situated in an Indian call center. But for the folks at the AFL-CIO, offshoring is neither a laughing matter nor a thing of the past. The labor federation and its community affiliate Working America have just released both a report and a database showing that the corporate practice of shifting jobs from the United States to cheaper foreign locales is still a burning issue for American workers and the American economy.

The report cites evidence that the use of offshoring is expanding in corporate America, though many companies have learned to be more discreet about it. The true extent of the job migration is difficult to determine, the report notes, because federal statistical agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis are not set up to measure this kind of phenomenon accurately.

For those less inclined toward policy briefs and more concerned about conditions in their community, the AFL and Working America also released a new version of their Job Tracker database. It allows one to plug in a Zip code and see a Google map with pushpins indicating workplaces that have experienced job flight, as indicated by WARN Act filings, Trade Adjustment Assistance certification and other data sources. Job Tracker also shows which workplaces have been hit with health and safety violations (from the OSHA database), labor law violations (from the NLRB database) and employment discrimination violations (from the database of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs).

More at the link, which I got from Facing South.
The interactive Job Tracker site full of data.
My part of metro Atlanta lit up the page, including almost two thousand companies with OSHA violations!

Find out which companies in your area are exporting jobs, laying off workers, endangering workers' health or involved in cases of violations of workers' rights. The database contains information on more than 400,000 companies nationwide.
Enter your ZIP code to see the detailed information.

I was unaware of the WARN Act.
Had to look it up.

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) was enacted on August 4, 1988 and became effective on February 4, 1989.

WARN offers protection to workers, their families and communities by requiring employers to provide notice 60 days in advance of covered plant closings and covered mass layoffs. This notice must be provided to either affected workers or their representatives (e.g., a labor union); to the State dislocated worker unit; and to the appropriate unit of local government.

In general, employers are covered by WARN if they have 100 or more employees, not counting employees who have worked less than 6 months in the last 12 months and not counting employees who work an average of less than 20 hours a week. Private, for-profit employers and private, nonprofit employers are covered, as are public and quasi-public entities which operate in a commercial context and are separately organized from the regular government. Regular Federal, State, and local government entities which provide public services are not covered.

The date was during the end of Ronald Reagan's second term. It didn't seem like something he would go for, and sure enough he didn't. The tenor of his statement makes me think Congress was about to over-ride his veto.

Workers should be given as much notice as possible when a business is forced to resort to layoffs, or to close altogether. Compassion demands no less. But the Federal government's mandating that businesses under virtually all conditions must give 60-days' notice -- even if doing so eliminates any chance to save the company -- is not a proper course. We should not go down the road of European labor policy -- a policy that has resulted in no net job growth in the last decade. The European experience has proven that notification mandated by law does not create or save one job. Nor does it assist those who find themselves without work -- it does just the opposite. Plant closing restrictions have resulted in fewer plant openings.

Federal law, unlike negotiations between labor and management, cannot anticipate the variety of individual circumstances faced by workers and firms. Federal laws like this one are counterproductive. Unfortunately, some in the Congress have been more interested in scoring political points with organized labor than in saving workers' jobs. To make matters worse, the Senate leadership refuses to even consider important trade legislation until final action is taken on the plant closing bill.

I salute those in the Congress who supported me on this issue. They saw beyond the parochial interest and voted for the national interest. They were right. But the national interest now dictates that the majority in the Congress must be forced to stop playing politics. Therefore, in order to end these political shenanigans and to get on with the business of the Nation -- especially enacting responsible trade legislation -- I have decided to allow the plant closing bill to become law but without my signature.

"Plant closing restrictions have resulted in fewer plant openings."
Hmm...
I need to think aboout that one.
That's what he said but I don't follow the reasoning. I think the decision to open or close a business has more to do with trends in the marketplace and tax considerations than regulations or restrictions.