OUTSOURCING
therightreport.com
By Andy Roth
Get this....I recently bought five white t-shirts on amazon.com for $2.70 a piece. That's $2.70!! These t-shirts are great, too. They aren't a 50/50 cheap blend of polyester and cotton like you're used to seeing. No, these are premium 100% cotton, double seam, high-quality Fruit of the Loom t-shirts.
And why were they so cheap? Because they were made in Honduras.
From a John Stossel article:
theunionleader.com
ABC News asked the AFL-CIO for its best examples of workers who lost jobs because of outsourcing. The first people they told us to talk to were Shirley and Ronnie Bernard.
The Bernards used to work at a Levi's factory in Knoxville, Tenn. But then, Levi's sent jobs to Mexico and closed that plant. It "tore a lot of people up because some people have been here since they were 16 years of age, and they've been here like 20-something-odd years," one woman told the local ABC affiliate. People "were in tears," said a man.
"You've done something for 20 years, got up, went to work every day, and then all of a sudden you don't have anyplace to go, and nobody needs you anymore," Shirley Bernard recalled.
Lou Dobbs feels their pain. The CNN anchor has made outsourcing complaints a trademark of his show. "Just because of cheap labor, we're, we're destroying our middle class," he told me. "That is just stupid. Being stupid is un-American."
...
"Oh, I love my job now!" That's Shirley Bernard talking — the outsourcing "victim" the AFL-CIO wanted me to interview. At her old job at Levi's, the work was hot, noisy and physically difficult. Now, she's a secretary. She's paid more, too.
She worries about the long term, and she's still an opponent of outsourcing, but she admits that many of her co-workers have moved on to better jobs. "Some of them have got, really got excellent jobs that they would never have even left Levi's for if the plant hadn't closed," she says.
"This kind of forced them to . . to make a decision what they wanted to do and . . . and they're really happy at what they do."
Remove the artifical trade boundaries between countries and allow people to do what they do best. The money I save on those t-shirts will now be spent on other things...things that I wouldn't have purchased otherwise. My purchasing power and my standard of living increased all because of outsourcing. Same with the workers in Honduras. Same with the people who received my extra dollars. Truth is, outsourcing works. |
