Something major is taking place in our country that corporate chieftains don’t
want us talking about: jobless creep.
It’s no longer blue-collar families who are seeing their jobs hauled offshore to faraway havens of low-wage production. Now it’s hundreds of thousands (and soon to be millions) of well-paying white-collar and high-tech jobs that are being shipped overseas by America’s wage-busting CEOs — and joblessness is creeping quietly but relentlessly upward, ensnaring families who previously thought they were solidly entrenched in the middle class.
CEOs are paranoid about any public discussion of this explosive movement, but among themselves they giddily exult at the prospect of essentially abandoning our country and its middle-class to fatten their profits on foreign workers. IBM, which is leading the way, has even coined a corporate euphemism for moving white-collar jobs out of the country: “global sourcing.” The rush is on. A Microsoft executive has instructed department heads in this software giant to “think India” and to “pick something to move offshore today.”
This is deliberate job destruction, but it is also much more — it’s an open assault on America’s middle class and on America’s unifying social ethic that “we’re all in this together.”
Corporate executives and their apologists say that this is simply the immutable workings of the market and that, after all, the CEO’s sole responsibility is to enrich the bottom line for top shareholders, with no obligation to an American middle class.
Fine. . . but if CEOs have no obligation to us, why should we feel any obligation
to them? We should begin to separate them from the special tax breaks, enormous
subsidies, regulatory favors, political privileges, and all other advantages
they’ve gotten from us.
This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2004.
