Josh Harkinson on May 29, 2012 writes on MotherJones:
“Bank of America, which last fall announced plans to lay off 30,000 workers, is about to go on a hiring spree—overseas.
“America’s second-largest bank is relocating its business-support operations to the Philippines, according to a high-ranking Filipino government official recently quoted in the Filipino press. The move, which includes a portion of the bank’s customer service unit, comes less than three years after Bank of America received a $45 billion federal bailout.”
“Needless to say, the outsourcing is bad news for an already hurting US call center industry, which has shed some 500,000 jobs during the past four years—about 10 percent of the total. The Communication Workers of America (CWA) hopes to reverse this trend by pushing the U.S. Call Center and Consumer Protection Act, a bill that would make any company that outsources call center jobs ineligible for federal loans and grants.
“In recent years, local governments in the deindustrializing Midwest have tried to boost their economies by luring call centers with generous tax breaks and economic incentives. T-Mobile, for instance, accepted more than $61 million in state and local recruitment subsidies to locate call center jobs here. But it recently announced it would close seven American call centers, putting around 2,000 people out of work—even as it continues to operate centers in the Philippines and Honduras. (The CWA called the company out in a recent report titled ‘Why Shipping Call Center Jobs Overseas Hurts Us Back Home.’)”
Our leaders need to insist on America FIRST policies and programs that broaden private, individual ownership of productive capital assets and employment.
Bank of America and countless other companies have been shrinking their U.S. operations while aggressively expanding and investing in other countries.
We already have companies manufacturing all sorts of products from electronics to vehicles outside America. Increasingly, the service industry is being outsourced.
What we are experiencing is the spread of plutocracy. That’s what we live in. That’s why things won’t change until we, the people, demand real change from both parties. For the dictionary-challenged, a plutocracy is a government run by and for the wealthy class.
President Obama argued in his State of the Union address that there were a few things the U.S. needed to do in order to recover from the economic recession. One of them was to export more of our goods around the world.
“The more products we make and sell to other countries, the more jobs we support right here in America,” Obama said.
That night, the president unveiled a new goal: to double U.S. exports over the next five years. It would be an increase that the president said would “support two million jobs in America.”
This applies to the service industry as well. America needs to protect its employment prospects and simultaneously empower ALL citizens to acquire private, individual ownership in future productive capital assets simultaneously with the growth of the economy.
To reinvigorate “Make It In America” and “Made In America,” the government should create financial incentives and tax provisions to reward American companies that bring manufacturing back to the United States from abroad, promote manufacturing investment, and incentivize more investment by foreign companies, all with the condition that the employees will share in the ownership benefits generated by the new capital formation projects. The result will be more broadened employee ownership and in-sourcing of jobs created by the new capital formation projects, and make America self-reliant. This should be the condition upon which EVERY company receiving American tax-payer support is required to adhere to.
The government should impose robust import levies and tariffs (tax) on particular classes of imports that are determined to be manufactured outside the United States and exported back to the United States that do not qualify as “Fair Trade” and unfairly undercut an American-make equivalent. At present, American business corporations are increasingly abandoning the United States and its communities to invest in productive capital formation outside the United States. Many major American business corporations have instigated this trend. As a result, America is experiencing the deindustrialization of America.
This is forcing policy makers to adopt a redistributive socialist solution rather than a democratic capitalist one whereby democratic economic growth of the earning power of the citizens would flourish simultaneously with new, broadly-owned productive capital formation investments in United States business corporations. Such overseas operations have the advantage of “sweat-shop” slave labor rates relative to American standards, low or no taxation, supportive infrastructure provisions, currency manipulation, and few if any environmental regulations––which translate to lower-cost production, as well as, in the instance of China, country state-owned venture investment benefiting those in power. Thus, producing the same product or service in the United States would be far more expensive.
For most people, economic globalization means a growing gap between rich and poor, technological alienation of the labor worker from the means of production, and the phenomenon of global corporations and strategic alliances forcing labor workers in high-cost wage markets, such as the United States, to compete with labor-saving capital tools and lower-paid foreign workers. Unemployment is high and there is an accelerating displacement of labor workers by technology and cheaper foreign labor, resulting in greater economic uncertainty and unstable retirement incomes for the average American citizen––causing the average citizen to become increasingly dependent on government wealth redistribution programs.
We need a policy change, which assures truly “Fair Trade” and that exponentially reduces the exodus of our manufacturing prowess and invigorates America’s entrepreneurial exceptionalism and competitive spirit to create products and services in the spirit of “the best that they can be.” We need policies that will de-incentivize American multinational corporations and others from undercutting “American Made,” while simultaneously competitively lowering the cost of production through expanded capital worker ownership in our business corporations. At present, the various incentives in place do not broaden capital ownership but instead further concentrate ownership––supported by American taxpayers. This is unjust and plain WRONG!!
The U.S. Call Center and Consumer Protection Act is a bill that addresses the outsourcing of service work, and would make any company that outsources call center jobs ineligible for federal loans and grants.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/bank-of-america-outsourcing-call-center-philippines
